A Disciplined, Charging Army

On October 3, 1980, just a month before his victory in the Presidential election, Ronald Reagan stopped in Lynchburg, Virginia, to address a convention of the National Religious Broadcasters, whose host was the Reverend Jerry Falwell, pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg and the president of the Moral Majority. On arriving at the airport, Reagan said, in answer to a question, that he was “quite sure” God heard the prayers of Jews. At the convention, he told an audience of pastors, students, and Lynchburg citizens that he believed in the separation of church and state. He also said that he supported voluntary, nonsectarian prayer in the public schools. “I don’t think we should have ever expelled God from the classroom,” he told the cheering audience. Reagan’s statements received national news coverage, for there was then some uncertainty about his theological views. In mid-August, at a convention of evangelical pastors in Dallas, he had confessed to having grave doubts about the theory of evolution, and asserted that the Bible contained the answers to all of the world’s problems. At that time, he had condemned the use of the separation of church and state as a means of keeping religious values out of government.

About a hundred members of the national press corps had arrived in Lynchburg two days before Reagan’s visit, in order to attend the whole of the religious broadcasters’ convention. They had hoped to be able to interview a number of the star television evangelists, but they were disappointed, for few of the stars showed up. Pat Robertson and Jim Bakker did not come, although they lived only a few counties away. Even Jerry Falwell was not much in evidence, because he had a son in the hospital and there was a concurrent meeting of the state chairmen of the Moral Majority to attend. Falwell did, however, hold a press conference, at which he denounced abortion, homosexuality, and pornography and called for increased American support to Israel and a stronger national defense. There was nothing much new in it: Falwell’s purpose was to assure the press that the Moral Majority was not a sinister organization with a “medieval mentality,” as some had alleged. The members of the press went away from the convention with the view that Reagan had moderated his theological position and Falwell had moderated his approach to politics.

About a year before, the press had begun to report on a campaign, already under way, to mold conservative Christians into a political voting bloc. The leaders of the campaign—a number of political organizers for conservative causes and a number of television evangelists—claimed a constituency of fifty million Protestant evangelicals and thirty million “morally conservative” Catholics, as well as a few million Mormons and Orthodox Jews. The political organizers did not, in spite of their public statements, really expect to enlist this whole constituency or to create a Christian political party. What they expected was that a campaign focussed on such concerns as abortion, homosexuality, and the proposed Equal Rights Amendment might swing sufficient numbers of Catholics and Protestant evangelicals to change the normal voting patterns and the election results. And by October of 1980 their expectation seemed a reasonable one. The new organizations—the Moral Majority, the Christian Voice—had grown apace; pastors, working at a local level through the churches, had registered impressive numbers of new voters and had raised money and volunteers for conservative, and against liberal, candidates in a number of states. In Alaska, for example, Moral Majority members had packed the Republican caucuses, and so, at the state convention, Ronald Reagan won all nineteen of Alaska’s delegates to the National Convention; they had also campaigned successfully to secure the Republican senatorial nomination for the conservative Frank Murkowski. The Moral Majority had had similar victories in Alabama and Iowa. In many other states, the organizations of evangelicals, in combination with Right-to-Life groups and conservative political-action committees, had defeated liberals and nominated those on the right wing of their Party in the Republican primaries. In many states, the relative influence of these various groups was difficult to measure, because the secular and the religious organizations tended to support the same candidates and espouse the same goals. The main issues continued to be abortion and “the family,” but the secular conservative groups also spoke out for prayer in the schools, and the pastors increasingly spoke out on the defense and foreign-policy issues of the right, such as the SALT II and Panama Canal treaties.

By October, the question was whether this conservative alliance might actually come to dominate the Republican Party. The Republican platform embodied the views of the alliance on a number of issues, including abortion, school prayers, gun control, and the need for military superiority; the Party also dropped its past commitment to the E.R.A. Though the organizers had initially favored John Connally to win the Presidential nomination, Reagan had proved sympathetic to many of their causes. True, he had rejected their candidate for the Vice-Presidency, Senator Jesse Helms, and had chosen a running mate whom they had specifically opposed. But he had selected Robert Billings, the former executive director of the Moral Majority, as his liaison with the religious groups. And after the Convention he had taken a number of positions espoused almost exclusively by the pastors and other members of the alliance—such as the desirability of America’s reëstablishing an official relationship with Taiwan. His appearance at the convention of religious broadcasters in Lynchburg seemed to testify to his accord with the pastors—and to the influence of Jerry Falwell.

Few journalists who visited Lynchburg for the convention had ever heard of Falwell until a few months before. That in itself was a curious fact, for by the summer of 1980 Falwell was well known to millions of Americans through the very media that many of the journalists themselves used: radio and television. On Sunday mornings, his religious television program, “The Old-Time Gospel Hour,” was broadcast on network affiliates and other VHF stations across the country; it was, according to Falwell, more widely distributed than the Johnny Carson show. Falwell was not the most popular evangelist on television, but he was one of a handful who in the nineteen-seventies had developed a nationwide audience and had been bringing in over thirty million dollars a year in contributions from that audience. As such, he was a part of a phenomenon.

In the nineteen-fifties and early sixties, most religious broadcasters on television were main-line clergymen—Catholics, Jews, and Protestants—who received free public-service air time. Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, and Rex Humbard had been on television since the nineteen-fifties, but by the nineteen-seventies a host of newcomers had taken over—men in their thirties and forties who created their own organizations to buy time on the air and acquired their own systems of distribution via satellite and cable networks. Many of them were charismatics, who preached the power of the Holy Spirit to heal and to work miracles; they tended to be fundamentalist and politically conservative. Along with the older evangelists, Pat Robertson, Jim Bakker, James Robison, Jerry Falwell, and others bought up most of the public-service time on Sunday-morning TV, pushing much of the main-line religious programming off the air and making television evangelism a big business for the first time. In the nineteen-seventies, the annual expenditure of TV ministries for air time went from around fifty million dollars to six hundred million; by the end of the decade, there were thirty religiously oriented TV stations, more than a thousand religious radio stations, and four religious networks—all of them supported by audience contributions.

The sudden and dramatic success of the so-called electric church resulted in part from changes within the media themselves. Television had begun as a highly centralized medium: the local stations were controlled by the networks, and the networks by Federal Communications Commission regulations. Because the F.C.C. demanded it, all stations had to allocate a certain amount of public-service time for religious programming. Because of network policy, many of the affiliates could not accept paid religious broadcasting. By the nineteen-seventies, this situation had changed. The networks no longer dominated their affiliates, and the F.C.C. had ruled that it would consider paid religious broadcasts as satisfying the public-service requirement; therefore, one affiliate after another had begun to sell off its Sunday-morning hours. Since there was—initially—little competition for the “religious ghetto” hours on Sunday morning, the evangelists could buy this time cheaply. The new technology of television—cable systems, communications satellites, and UHF stations—made air time even more available. And it made it even cheaper, too, since many cable stations would pick up the religious broadcasts free to fill their programming schedules. Thus, even in fiscal 1979 it cost Falwell only nine million dollars a year to broadcast his daily radio and weekly television programs all over the country. In addition, new computer technology (or the new availability of it) permitted independent evangelists to establish sophisticated “feedback loops” through telephone banks and direct-mail services with “personalized” letters and solicitations. These feedback loops were, in a sense, the key to the evangelists’ operations, for it took relatively few people giving ten or twenty dollars a month to keep the programs on the air.

The main-line clergy—who worried a great deal about this use of television—insisted upon the minority status of these evangelists, and pointed to ratings showing that Oral Roberts reached only two per cent of American households each week and that most of them, including Robertson, Bakker, and Falwell, reached less than one per cent. (National television ratings, however, do not take into account the cable channels, so these figures are in fact significantly higher.) The main-line clergy also pointed out that the audiences for these programs consisted mainly of women over forty-five in relatively low income brackets. They said that while many of the programs of major churches had far larger ratings, this meant nothing to the television stations, since the major churches could not pay for the air time (and would not solicit contributions). The local stations, by selling off their Sunday-morning air time, had permitted those evangelists with no scruples about commercializing religion to drive much of the other clergy—Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish—off the air. In 1980, ninety per cent of all religion on television was commercial, and most of it was controlled by right-wing fundamentalist groups. In the view of the mainstream clergy, this represented a distortion of the medium and a great injustice to the majority of Americans.

All the same, the mainstream clergy had to admit that the television evangelists had come along at a time of change in the religious life of the country. During the nineteen-seventies, they had watched a decline in the membership of liberal churches and a rather dramatic rise in the membership of conservative churches. In 1976, the year of Jimmy Carter’s election, the Gallup organization had found that there were fifty million “born-again Christians” in the country. About half of them were fundamentalists, and not even all of the fundamentalists were consistently conservative on social and political issues. Still, as the political mood of the country was shifting toward the right the religious trend was away from the social gospel and toward the pietistic and the privatistic. The liberal clergy feared that the capture of the media by conservative evangelists had increased this trend, and that in the end the evangelists might succeed in changing the structure of religious life in the country.

Theologically speaking, it is easy to see why conservative evangelists should be attracted to television as a medium: for those who believe that salvation can be achieved by a sudden, spontaneous leap to faith, television serves as the equivalent of a vast revival tent, offering immediate mass escape from eternal damnation. But why a mass television audience should be attracted to a specifically fundamentalist theology is—in the abstract—less understandable. From a doctrinal point of view, fundamentalism is, after all, a gloomy and demanding enterprise that goes against much of what has long been assumed to be the American grain: faith in science, faith in human nature, and faith that man can improve the conditions of life on earth. Fundamentalism runs through a number of Protestant denominations (there are Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist fundamentalists in addition to Holiness and Pentecostal fundamentalists), but at its core is the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy. Fundamentalists believe that every word in the Bible is—literally—the Word of God. Many of them also believe that creation occurred in exactly six days around ten thousand years ago, and that human history will end fairly soon with the coming of the Antichrist, and after that most of mankind will have to endure a terrible period of tribulation before Christ returns to the earth and installs his millennial reign of peace and justice (the doctrine of premillennialism). The world is now full of sin and suffering, but even Christians can do little to improve matters, since man’s very nature is evil. The sole task for a Christian is to bring as many others as possible to Christ, so that they can escape the tribulation to come.

This dour message was not, however, much in evidence on the television airwaves—and certainly not in the programming of the big-time evangelists. Anyone who turned on the tube of a Sunday morning would see a lot of well-washed, smiling faces and hear the only two pieces of good news in fundamentalist theology: the certainty of salvation for the believer, and the willingness of God to intervene directly in the believer’s life. On the “700 Club,” sleek, good-looking Pat Robertson would interview a celebrity guest, such as Charles Colson, then, minutes later, fall to his knees, lift his hands to Heaven, and say, “There’s a woman in Philadelphia who has cancer—cancer of the lymph nodes. It hasn’t been diagnosed yet, but God has just cured her of it!” On the James Robison show, Robison, who looks like a combination of James Dean and Burt Lancaster, would thunder on about sexual perversion and “secular humanism,” then introduce a lovely woman singer—or perhaps the lovely Mr. and Mrs. Cullen Davis, newly brought to Christ. The Oral Roberts show has grand vistas and large multitudes. Standing tall against the skyline of his new hospital and university complex, in Tulsa, Roberts directs banked choirs in inspirational singing or calls students out of the huge auditorium to pray over the mountains of mail he receives. The message that comes through clearest from all these shows is that God pays particular attention to the health and financial prosperity of those who send in contributions to religious TV shows.

Fundamentalist evangelists have traditionally preached the American civil religion; that is, reverence for the flag, for freedom, for the armed forces, and for the American way of life. Most of the television evangelists have thus been addressing political and social issues for some time. Still, it was somewhat surprising that they would launch themselves directly into electoral politics—that was a break with tradition. And not all of them did join the fray. Oral Roberts, a paternal and politically moderate figure, kept out of it altogether—as did Billy Graham and Rex Humbard. It was the younger men who stepped forward: Pat Robertson, the host of a talk show and the director of a religious network in Virginia Beach, Virginia; Jim Bakker, a former protégé of Robertson’s, who has duplicated Robertson’s success with his own talk show and his own religious network, in North Carolina; James Robison, in Fort Worth; and Jerry Falwell, in Lynchburg. Initially, it was Pat Robertson who showed the greatest enthusiasm for politics. In the fall of 1979, he brought politicians onto his talk show, endorsed candidates all over the map, and told the press, “We have enough votes to run the country.” Jim Bakker was not far behind. In November of 1979, he told a reporter, “Our goal is to influence all viable [Presidential] candidates on issues important to the church. We want answers. We want appointments in government.” In the late spring of 1980, however, both Robertson and Bakker retreated from the political arena, having apparently decided that the risks of political involvement were too great. (Hence, perhaps, their decision not to attend the broadcasters’ convention where Reagan would speak.) In the end, only two of the superstars—Robison and Falwell—remained in the fight. Interestingly, unlike Bakker and Robertson, they were not charismatics: Robison was a Southern Baptist, and Falwell the pastor of an independent Baptist church. Falwell was the senior of the two, with the larger television audience, and, as head of the Moral Majority, he took a more active role than Robison. By the end of the campaign, he had become for the press the symbolic head of the whole fundamentalist political movement. “We are fighting a holy war,” Falwell had said, “and this time we are going to win.”

By comparison with the other evangelists (who were his competitors in what became a fierce and expensive competition for Sunday-morning air time), Falwell is the most sober and conventional of preachers. His program, “The Old-Time Gospel Hour,” is simply a videotape recording of the eleven-o’clock service in the Thomas Road Baptist Church. (The tape is edited, and extra footage is occasionally added.) The choir behind him sings traditional Baptist hymns, and he, strong-jawed and portly of figure, wearing a thick three-piece black suit, looks every inch the Baptist preacher of the pre-television era. True, there is a good deal of showmanship in his services. The female members of one of his singing groups, the Sounds of Liberty, wear Charlie’s Angels hairdos and seem to snuggle up against their virile-looking male counterparts. Don Norman, one of the resident soloists and a pastor of the church, has a distinctly television-era pouf to his silver-gray hair. Another resident soloist, a cherub-faced young man called Robbie Hiner, provides comic relief by joking with Falwell and by wearing, on occasion, a bright-green suit, which contrasts strikingly with the baby-blue carpeting of the church. The “inspirational” singing involves a good deal of heavy breathing and a good many references to heavenly riches. Falwell does not, however, actually say that financial rewards will accrue to those who send him money. And, unlike many of the evangelists, he quite often mentions the problems of leading a Christian life in a sinful world.

In a sense, it was not surprising that Falwell decided to go into politics. No mystical, otherworldly type of Baptist, he is most characteristically an organizer and a promoter. In 1956, he founded the Thomas Road Baptist Church with thirty-five people in an old factory building. Twenty-five years later, he has by far the biggest church in Lynchburg. It holds four thousand people and is jammed for every service on Sundays. He has a school, Lynchburg Christian Academy, from kindergarten through the twelfth grade, for the children of his parishioners; he has a home for alcoholics, a summer camp for children, a Bible institute and correspondence course, a seminary, and Liberty Baptist College, which is accredited and for which he is engaged in building a campus. He has a few wealthy backers, but most of his funds come from small contributors in Lynchburg and around the country. Businessmen in Lynchburg say he is a born leader and the best salesman they have ever seen.

But Falwell is also, as he has said, a “separatist, premillennialist, pre-tribulationist sort of fellow.” He believes, he has said, that “this is the terminal generation before Jesus comes.” And in 1965 he eloquently argued the doctrine of separation from the world in a sermon called “Ministers and Marchers”:

As far as the relationship of the church to the world, it can be expressed as simply as the three words which Paul gave to Timothy—“Preach the Word.” We have a message of redeeming grace through a crucified and risen Lord. This message is designed to go right to the heart of man and there meet his deep spiritual need. Nowhere are we commissioned to reform the externals. We are not told to wage wars against bootleggers, liquor stores, gamblers, murderers, prostitutes, racketeers, prejudiced persons or institutions, or any other existing evil as such. Our ministry is not reformation but transformation. The gospel does not clean up the outside but rather regenerates the inside. . .

While we are told to “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” in the true interpretation, we have very few ties on this earth. We pay our taxes, cast our votes as a responsibility of citizenship, obey the laws of the land, and other things demanded of us by the society in which we live. But, at the same time, we are cognizant that our only purpose on this earth is to know Christ and to make Him known. Believing the Bible as I do, I would find it impossible to stop preaching the pure saving gospel of Jesus Christ, and begin doing anything else—including fighting Communism, or participating in civil-rights reforms.

At his press conference at the broadcasters’ convention, Falwell repudiated this sermon as “false prophecy.” Last summer, he had moved a hundred and eighty degrees from his former position by vowing to undertake civil disobedience if Congress voted to draft women into the armed forces.

Why Falwell changed his mind is an interesting question, and, in view of the fact that great numbers of fundamentalist pastors and lay people around the country went through the same transformation in the nineteen-seventies, it is also an important one. In the nineteen-sixties, fundamentalists had been one of the least politicized groups in the country; as Falwell discovered, very few of them were even registered to vote. Whether or not their numbers were on the increase, by the mid-seventies they had begun to make their voices heard. In 1974, for instance, fundamentalist pastors and parents in Kanawha County, West Virginia, had closed the schools down in protest against the introduction of schoolbooks that they said were un-Christian, unpatriotic, and destructive of the family and constituted an incitement to racial violence. A committee of the National Education Association investigated what became a prolonged series of demonstrations, and concluded that the trouble resulted in part from the cultural gap between the school board and the isolated mountain communities it served. The Kanawha County incident itself, however, turned out to be far from isolated. In the mid-seventies, groups of “concerned citizens” in many parts of the country, including the Northeast and the Midwest, attempted to purge their schools of similar books, protested against sex education, lobbied for the teaching of “scientific creationism” in biology courses, and called for the return of the old pedagogy of rote work. In hundreds of other communities—principally but not exclusively in the South—parents pulled their children out of the public schools and helped their pastors to build “Christian academies.” According to Falwell, there were fourteen hundred “Christian” schools in the early sixties and sixteen thousand in October of 1980, with new ones going into construction at the rate of one every seven hours. The same period saw the growth of statewide, then nationwide campaigns against abortion, gay rights, and the E.R.A. Supported by fundamentalist pastors—such as Falwell—these campaigns had considerable success in state referenda and in state legislatures. Fundamentalists were not the only constituency for these movements (Anita Bryant is a fundamentalist, while Phyllis Schlafly is a Catholic), but they were an important one, and their pastors had influence with other conservative evangelicals. By 1978, a Washington-based group of political organizers on the right—a group that included Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail specialist; Howard Phillips, the director of the Conservative Caucus; Terry Dolan, of the National Conservative Political Action Committee; and Paul Weyrich, of the Heritage Foundation and the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress—had identified the fundamentalist pastors as a strategic element in the building of a new coalition, which they called the New Right.

There was something extraordinary about all this. At the time of the Scopes trial, in 1925, most educated people had considered fundamentalism outmoded and irrelevant—a mere reaction to the advances in science and to modernity in general. Since then, American historians have tended to neglect the fundamentalist constituency or to see it as vestigial—the last cry of the still backwaters of the South against the modern world. But now fundamentalism was the religion of television and a part of the evangelical revival of the nineteen-seventies and eighties. The oldest right in America had become the New Right of 1980. Instead of being typified by a businessman on the golf links, the Republican Party leadership was now looking more and more like William Jennings Bryan in a double knit and television makeup. Pastors who once counselled withdrawal from the world of sin—and specifically the evils of politics—now bargained with politicians in the back rooms of Congress and gave sermons on defense policy.

Falwell’s own explanation for these things, as one might imagine, has to do with the increasingly parlous state of the nation and the sense of crisis he and other Americans began to feel in the mid-seventies. That crisis, he says, now extends across the board, from the forty per cent divorce rate to the growth of the pornography industry to the feminist movement, the widespread use of drugs, social-worker intervention in the family, sex education, abortion on demand, the “abandonment” of Taiwan and the “loss” of the Panama Canal, Internal Revenue Service interference with “Christian” schools, rampant homosexuality, the notion of children’s rights, and the spread of “secular humanism.” In his view, all these things have corrupted the moral fibre of the country and destroyed its will to resist Communism. In his view, the country is in far worse shape than it was thirty, or even ten, years ago. In his view, moral Americans—Catholics, Protestants, Mormons, and Jews—finally woke up to this fact and realized that they must do something about it.

It is a theory, and, like most theories about American society, it is difficult to test on the national level. It cannot be proved by Nielsen ratings, voting statistics, or public-opinion polls—certainly not by the polls that Falwell sends his supporters, which ask such questions as “Do you approve of the American flag being burned in liberal and radical anti-American demonstrations?” and “Do you approve of the ratification of the E.R.A., which could well lead to homosexual marriages, unisexual bathrooms, and, of course, the mandatory drafting of women for military combat?” It is a theory, and it may be the correct one. Yet it is a theory that seems singularly farfetched in the context of Lynchburg, Virginia, for a more stable, tranquil, family-oriented city would be hard to find. But Lynchburg is the city where Falwell grew up and where he found his congregation.

Lynchburg lies on the James River, in a country of small farms and wooded, rolling hills at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. A hundred and sixty miles southwest of Washington, it is beyond the gentleman-farming, horse-breeding country and more than halfway to Appalachia. It’s a small city—only sixty-seven thousand people—far from any major urban center. All the same, it is enterprising and not wholly provincial. Several large American corporations have plants in Lynchburg, and its nearly two hundred small factories turn out a great variety of goods, including paper products, medical supplies, children’s clothing, and shoes. Because of the diversity of its manufactures, business journals sometimes use it for a Middletown or a model of the national economy as a whole. It is an old manufacturing city—one of the oldest in the South, according to its Chamber of Commerce—but it does not look it, for there are few belching smokestacks. The vista from the top of its one twenty-story building is mainly of trees and a bend in the river. It does not rival Charlottesville—sixty miles to the north—as a cultural center; yet it is perhaps best known in the South for two women’s colleges, Randolph-Macon and Sweet Briar, which have turned out generations of Southern debutantes.

Lynchburg was founded—fairly recently, for Virginia—in the late eighteenth century, by John Lynch, an Irish-American tobacco farmer. During the Revolutionary War, John’s brother Colonel Charles Lynch set up an informal military court on his property and sentenced Tories to hanging by their thumbs—thus the origin of the word “lynching.” Lynchburg began as a tobacco-trading center and an agricultural market town. In the nineteenth century, new settlers—many of them Scotch-Irish Methodists and Presbyterians—moved in to build grain mills, an iron foundry, and small manufacturing enterprises. During the Civil War, it served as a staging area and hospital center for the Confederate Army of northern Virginia. After the war, its small tobacco farms grew less profitable, but its manufacturers prospered. When the industrial revolution came along, the Lynchburg merchants had the capital to build new foundries, cotton mills, and textile mills and a shoe factory. They used white labor almost exclusively, the blacks remaining on small, poor farms in the countryside.

In 1950, Lynchburg was still a mill town, most of its factories old-fashioned and its society hidebound, stratified, and segregated. But in the mid-fifties the town underwent the kind of transformation that was taking place in communities all across the South. A number of major national corporations began to arrive in town, attracted by low property taxes, nonunion labor, and relatively low pay scales. Among them were Babcock & Wilcox, the manufacturer of nuclear reactors; General Electric, which built a radio-assembly plant; and Meredith/Burda, a printing enterprise. The national corporations stimulated local industry and attracted other large manufacturers, from the North and from West Germany. Lynchburg businessmen now point with pride to the healthy diversity of the economy and to high levels of employment, even in recession times. In fact, the unemployment rate is usually lower than the national average; still, the median family income in Lynchburg is below that of Virginia as a whole. But the town has changed in other ways since 1950, for the big industries brought new money into town and new faces into the boardrooms and the country clubs. The colleges flourished. And in the mid-sixties, when the black ministers and their congregations conducted a series of sit-ins and demonstrations, they found that the white community was not immovable. Under pressure, the companies hired black workers, and the city’s segregation ordinances were stricken from the books.

Lynchburg calls itself a city, but it is really a collection of suburbs, its population spread out over fifty square miles. In the nineteen-fifties, its old downtown was supplanted by a series of shopping plazas, leaving it with no real center. There’s a good deal of variety to its neighborhoods. Along the James River, in a section called Rivermont, stately nineteenth-century mansions look out over wooded parks and lawns. Behind them are streets of white-shingled Victorian houses and, behind them, tracts of comfortable post-Second World War developer-built Capes and Colonials. At the edges of town, the developers are still at work, and streets with such names as Crestview and Forest Park run through sections of half-acre lots before dead-ending in the woods. There are poor neighborhoods in Lynchburg—neighborhoods where cocks crow in the back yards of trembling wooden houses—and a part of the old downtown is a depressed area of abandoned factories and boarded-up shops. But there are no real slums. The city has used federal funds to build low-cost housing, and it is now having some success in revitalizing the old downtown.

Lynchburg is not a graceful city. The automobile has cut too many swaths across it, leaving gasoline stations and fast-food places to spring up in parking-lot wastelands. But it is a clean city, full of quiet streets and shade trees. Even the factories are clean; the new ones are windowless buildings with landscaped lawns. It’s a safe city and a comfortable place to live. There’s not much crime or juvenile delinquency. The medical services are good. The public schools are handsome, well equipped, and good enough to send sixty-three per cent of their students on to college. They are also racially integrated and free of racial tension. As for the things Falwell spends so much time denouncing—pornography, drugs, “the homosexual life style”—Lynchburg harbors these things quietly if it harbors them at all. You can find Playboy in a few magazine racks, but the movie theatres rarely play even an R-rated film. There are a number of bar-restaurants and discos. But the hottest band in town is probably the combo that plays nightly in the lounge of the Sheraton Inn. At night, young people can go to the skating rink or to night games of the New York Mets farm team, held at the Lynchburg Municipal Stadium. If there is a single public nuisance for the young in this town, it is surely boredom.

Lynchburg is a city of churches—it has over a hundred of them—and the first question people ask of new acquaintances is not what they do but what church they attend. At church time on Sunday, the streets are empty and quiet, with almost all the cars in town parked near the churches. Dominated by its churches and by its business community, it is a conservative place in most respects. Traditionally a Byrd Democrat town, it has turned Republican in recent years, voting for Gerald Ford in 1976—while remaining faithful to Harry Byrd. Still, it has its liberal element. The population is twenty-five per cent black, and the civil-rights movement left a well-organized black community. And, besides Liberty Baptist College, Randolph-Macon, and Sweet Briar, it has another liberal-arts college: Lynchburg College, which is coeducational. These colleges do not generate much intellectual ferment or political radicalism, but they and their graduates do provide the city with other voices and a useful degree of political flexibility. The seven-member city council includes at least four moderate liberals, among them a woman and a black man. These liberals now belong. They participate in the humane and amicable consensus that runs the city. When they speak to outsiders, it is in the complacent tone of the Chamber of Commerce.

Falwell’s church, on Thomas Road, is a block or two away from Lynchburg College, in one of the older middle-class sections. From the outside, it is not much to look at: a large, octagonal brick building fronting the street, with a three-story brick school behind it. The parking lot beside it is, however, supermarket-size, and on Sundays the cars jam up the street for blocks trying to fit into it beside the school buses. In summer, many of the cars come from out of state, for families from all over the country like to visit the church they watch on television. In winter, the cars and school buses bring Liberty Baptist College students and visitors from small rural churches in the area as well as the regular church members.

Winter and summer, the congregation looks like nothing more or less than the solid midsection of this town. It consists mainly of couples with two or three children, but there are a number of young adults and a number of elderly people. The men wear double-knit suits and sport gold wedding bands or heavy brass rings stamped with mottoes; the women, their hair neatly coiffed and lacquered, wear demure print dresses and single-diamond engagement rings. The young women and the high-school girls are far more fashionable. Their flowered print dresses fall to mid-calf but are cut low on the bodice and worn with ankle-strap high heels. They wear their hair long, loose, and—almost uniformly—flipped and curled in Charlie’s Angels style. Like the boys with their white shirts, narrow-fitted pants, and close-cropped hair, they look fresh-faced and extraordinarily clean. The members of the congregation look, in other words, much like Robbie Hiner, Don Norman, and the other singers who appear on “The Old-Time Gospel Hour.” There are proportionately about the same number of blacks in the congregation as there are in the choir—which is to say, very few. (The television cameras tend to pan in on the two black choir members, thus making them more conspicuous to the television audience than they are to the congregation in the church.) What is startling about the congregation is its uniform aspect.

As it turns out, a number of the Thomas Road Church members live in the new, developer-built houses on the edges of town; comfortable suburban-style houses set on half-acre lawns, with central air-conditioning and kitchens like the ones that appear in detergent advertisements on television—and just as clean. To these houses, the Thomas Road families have added shag rugs and wallpaper or chintz curtains. A woman I visited, Nancy James, had just bought a living-room suite, and another, Jackie Gould, had ordered a new set of kitchen cabinets and had them installed without—she says, giggling—consulting her husband. One family had not only a living room but a family room, with a Naugahyde pouf, a twenty-four-inch television set, and a sliding glass door looking out over a stone-paved terrace. On a Sunday evening while I was there, this couple gave a potluck supper for twenty neighbors and fellow church members. The man of the house—resplendent in a fitted white shirt, cream-colored trousers, and white shoes—watched a boxing match on television with the other men while his wife organized the dishes of ham, baked beans, candied squash, and potato salad the other women had brought with them. At dinner, around a lace-covered table, the guests joked and made small talk about their gardens, the water system in Lynchburg, the problems of giving a Tupperware party, and the advantages of building one’s own house. After dinner, the men and women separated, the men going into the living room and the women upstairs for an hour or so of Bible reading and prayers.

In such circumstances, it was difficult to see how Falwell could complain so much about moral decay, sex, drink, drugs, the decline of the family, and so on. Conversely, it was difficult to imagine why such people would be drawn to a preacher who spent so much time denouncing drink and pornography. On the face of it, these people would seem far better suited to a tolerant, easygoing church whose pastor would not make a point—as Falwell once did—of forbidding his congregants to watch “Charlie’s Angels.” Of course, not all Thomas Road Church members live in such order and comfort. To go with its pastors on their rounds is to see that the Sunday-morning impression of the congregation is to some degree misleading—or in the nature of a Platonic ideal. A number of its members live in government-sponsored housing projects or in neighborhoods of old wooden houses. In one thin-walled apartment, I saw a woman sitting with her head in her hands gazing dejectedly at four squalling children under the age of nine—the baby crawling naked across the linoleum floor. (The pastor prissily told the older girl to put some underpants on the baby.) At a church-sponsored flea market, I found a number of women with worn faces buying and selling children’s used clothing while their husbands squatted in a circle under a nearby tree and talked about boot camp and “Nam.” According to one pastor, many of the elderly people in the church are single women who live on Social Security allowances of four or five thousand dollars a year. And most of them, according to the pastor, have never travelled outside the state of Virginia.

What is more, to talk to the people who live in the comfortable suburban-style houses is to discover that many of them did not grow up in such middle-class circumstances. William Sheehan, chairman of the church’s Division of Prayer, became a lawyer late in life. He ran away from home and a drunken father at the age of eighteen and lived for a year with his grandfather in the boiler room of a school in Montana. He held various jobs, married at the age of twenty-one, and had nine children. His family responsibilities kept him hard at work at manual or clerical jobs. Only when he was in his forties did he have the time to study. He then took night courses in law, passed the state bar exam, apprenticed himself to an older lawyer, and eventually inherited a practice in a small Montana town. In conversation, Sheehan thanks God in every other sentence and gives the Lord credit for everything that he has ever done or that has ever happened to him. He never drank, he said, but he was able to stop cursing when he accepted Jesus Christ as his Saviour, at the age of nineteen.

Most of Falwell’s parishioners came from closer to home, but a lot of them came from the countryside and the small towns of southern Virginia and West Virginia. One guest at the potluck supper talked about his childhood in a narrow coal-mining valley of Appalachia, where the preachers handled poisonous snakes and spoke in tongues. He has never got used to the Lynchburg traffic, he said, for where he had lived the sound of a car on the road meant that you picked up your shotgun and left by the back door.

To talk to Falwell’s parishioners is to see that the geography of Lynchburg is symbolic in terms of their lives. As the city stands between Appalachia and Washington, D.C., so the arrival of new industry over the past twenty-five years made it the transfer point between the Old and the New South, between the technologically backward and the technologically modern parts of the society. Many current Lynchburg residents, including many Thomas Road members, literally made the journey between the underdeveloped countryside and the city. Many others, however, made a similar journey without moving at all. In the early fifties, Lynchburg had a relatively unskilled work force and a very small middle class; today, it has a highly skilled work force and a much larger middle class. Falwell’s parishioners stand, as it were, on the cusp of this new middle class. They are clerical workers, technicians, and small businessmen, and skilled and semiskilled workers in the new factories.

Among the church members and the students at Liberty Baptist are many who grew up in fundamentalist Christian families and have never known any other way of life. Those who came from the small towns of Virginia or West Virginia think of Lynchburg as a sophisticated city; and those who came from big cities like Philadelphia think of it as a refuge from the anarchy of modern America. Among those who do not have a fundamentalist background, a high proportion seem to have had difficult, disorganized childhoods—family histories of alcoholism, physical violence, or trouble with the law. They had—or so they say—to struggle out of their families and then to struggle with themselves. They credit the Lord with their success, and they date their success from the moment they were, as they say, “saved.”

Falwell’s parishioners do not give the Thomas Road Baptist Church—or any other church—credit for the changes in their lives, because in their theology it is an error (specifically, a Catholic error) to suppose that institutions stand between man and God. There is some irony in this belief, for the Thomas Road Church is a great deal more than a house for prayers. It is a vast and mighty institution, with some sixty pastors and about a thousand volunteer helpers and trainees. It has the Lynchburg Christian Academy, the summer camp, and Liberty Baptist College, whose students worship and work in the church. In addition, it has separate ministries for children, young people, adults, elderly people, the deaf, the retarded, and the imprisoned. Last year, it added a ministry for divorced people and another one for unmarried young adults. On Sundays, the church holds three general services and has Sunday-school classes for children of every age group, from the nursery on up. But it is a center of activity every day of the week. There is a general prayer meeting every Wednesday night. Then, every week each ministry offers a program of activities for its age group, including Bible-study classes, lectures, trips, sports outings, and picnics. The ministries also organize groups of volunteers to visit hospitals, nursing homes, and prisons and to proselytize in the community. The organization is so comprehensive that any Thomas Road member, old or young, could spend all his or her time in church or in church-related activities. In fact, many church members do just that.

Eldridge Dunn, a former tool-and-die-maker for General Electric, runs one of the largest and busiest of the church organizations, the Children’s Ministry. Dunn explained to me that the purpose of his ministry is to provide a total environment for children—a society apart from the world. “Our philosophy is that children should not have to go into the world,” he said. “They should not have to get involved with drugs or Hollywood movies. But you can’t just tell kids not to do things. You have to give them something to do. So we try to provide them with everything that’s necessary for children. We take the older kids backpacking. We’ll rent a skating rink this year. Our idea is to compete with the world.” This philosophy, Dunn went on to say, is not unique to the Thomas Road Church; all churches advocating separation from the world engage in a similar competition, however limited their resources—and some churches have far better facilities than Thomas Road. What distinguishes his church is its aggressiveness. “I’d like to build a program for every child in Lynchburg,” Dunn said.

On Monday afternoons, Gary Hunt, a ministerial student in his mid-twenties working with the Thomas Road Youth Ministry, collects a dozen or more children from various parts of Lynchburg in a school bus and takes them back to his house for the afternoon. With one exception, the children do not come from Thomas Road families or attend Lynchburg Christian Academy. Hunt, who is tall, blond, and athletic, found them by hanging around a junior high school and playing basketball with the kids coming out of class. Now they gather at his house every week for sports and a Bible-study class, and they have all been, as they say, “saved.”

When I arrived at the Hunts’ house one Monday afternoon, Hunt was just bringing the boys in from a ballgame outside, and his wife, Angie, was showing the girls how to bake chocolate-chip cookies. For a while, the kitchen was a confusion of twelve-year-olds, the girls yelling at each other and the boys wandering around sweatily in search of something to drink. When the kids had quieted down, Gary took the boys to the basement, and Angie settled the girls in the living room. Downstairs, Hunt had the boys sit in a circle around him and passed out small workbooks. Asking them to turn to the chapter on baptism, he read out the text and explained, in a manner that seemed to me perfunctory, the scriptural basis for baptism. He seemed less interested in having them understand the idea of baptism than in having them copy the correct words in the blank spaces of the workbook. But, then, three or four of the boys did not read very well, and all of them seemed to have a hard time sitting still and concentrating on anything for long. When the spaces were filled in, Hunt talked to the boys briefly about their behavior, reminding them that smoking and cursing were sins, and praising them for making progress toward their goal of living as Christ did. He ended by inviting two of them to join the church choir and by asking those who were not baptized to come with him to the church on Sunday and go through the ceremony. The boys agreed with a touching eagerness.

Later, Hunt told me that most of the children came from fairly poor families and that most of them were not Baptists by background. “Some of them are rough kids,” he said. “The girls don’t know anything about conduct—they yell at each other. Angie shows them how to be ladylike and how to do things they don’t do at home, like baking cookies. The boys are tough—used to using their fists. But they’ve come a long way in a few months. They’re less wild. They don’t swear like they used to, and they don’t fight with the other kids so much.”

The pastors and pastoral students at the Thomas Road Baptist Church conceive of their activities in theological terms and could, if called upon, justify any one of them by a Biblical quotation. All the same, to listen to Hunt or to see a pastor remind a little girl to put underpants on her baby brother is to see that they are involved in a world of appearances, social forms, and personal behavior at some remove from Biblical history and at some remove from the direct, mystical experience of Christ. For them, getting “saved” is clearly only the first step. It is true that most clergymen of all faiths are involved with the conduct of daily life, but the Thomas Road pastors—and fundamentalist pastors generally—have a much more specific and detailed set of prescriptions for the conduct of everyday life than do most Protestant churchmen. They have—like many Southern Baptists—absolute prohibitions against drink, tobacco, drugs, cursing, dancing, rock and roll, and extramarital sex, but they also have specific prescriptions for dress, child rearing, and the conduct of a marriage. The Liberty Baptist College student handbook, for instance, decrees that men are to wear ties to all classes. “Hair should be cut in such a way that it does not come over the ear or collar. Beards or mustaches are not permitted. Sideburns should be no longer than the bottom of the ear.” As for women, “dresses and skirts. . . shorter than two inches [below] the middle of the knee are unacceptable. Anything tight, scant, backless, and low in the neckline is unacceptable. . . .” These rules are less formally laid down for the members of the Thomas Road Church.

For the proper relations between husband and wife, parents and children, the rules are spelled out in a book called “The Total Family,” written by Edward Hindson, the family-guidance pastor of the church, and endorsed by Falwell. According to Hindson:

The Bible clearly states that the wife is to submit to her husband’s leadership and help him fulfill God’s will for his life. She is to submit to him just as she would submit to Christ as her Lord. This places the responsibility of leadership upon the husband where it belongs. In a sense, submission is learning to duck, so God can hit your husband! He will never realize his responsibility to the family as long as you take it.

The same passages that command the wife to obey her husband, command the husband to love his wife! Being a leader is not being a dictator, but a loving motivator, who, in turn, is appreciated and respected by his family. Dad, God wants you to be the loving heartbeat of your home by building the lives of your family through teaching and discipline.

In another chapter, Hindson deals with the parent-child relationship and gives “Five Steps to Effective Discipline.” He attacks Dr. Benjamin Spock, modern psychology, and modern public education, on the ground that they have encouraged children to challenge their parents. Parents founding their authority on the word of God should, he says, command absolute authority over their children. Spanking, he explains, is Biblically mandated and must be employed if we are not to have another generation of irresponsible, undisciplined adults.

The pastors at Thomas Road would define most relationships outside the family in terms congruent with these. In school, children should not challenge their teachers but should accept instruction and discipline. On the job, a man should work hard, show discipline, and accept the authority of his employer. He should accept the authority of the church and the civil government in the same way. “He does not have the right to break the law, no matter how just his cause may seem,” Hindson writes. The pastors would, in fact, make a Confucian equation between the relationships of man to civil government and church and of children to their parents. In Hindson’s book, there is an organization chart that depicts these relationships: from “God,” at the top, the lines of authority descend to “local church,” on the one hand, and “civil authority,” on the other; the lines then descend and converge upon “total family”—father first, then mother, then children. The organization chart is entitled “God’s Chain of Command.”

The pastors at Thomas Road talk about creating a society apart from the world. But when they talk about “the world” in this context what they clearly mean is pornography, drugs, “secular humanism,” and so on: the evils of the world as they see them, and not American life in general. It is not, then, really paradoxical that many of their prescriptions for life look very much like tactics for integrating people into society rather than like tactics for separating them from it. Most communities, after all, would be happy to have a clean, hardworking family man who respected authority, obeyed the law, and kept off the welfare rolls. A factory manager, a city official, or a landlord would find such a man an ideal type—particularly if the alternative to him were a drinking, brawling country fellow with no steady job, six runny-nosed kids, and a shotgun he might consider using against a law officer. And, to look at it from another angle, the country fellow would get nowhere with General Electric or the Rotary Club, even if he desperately wanted to. As for the women involved—why, they might have invented this church, so heavily do the prohibitions fall on traditional male vices such as drinking, smoking, running around, and paying no heed to the children. To tell “Dad” that he made all the decisions would be a small price to pay to get the father of your children to become a respectable middle-class citizen.

The pastors at Thomas Road set enormous store by the virtues of sports for young men. And sports, the oldest of Anglo-Saxon prescriptions for the sublimation of male violence and male sexual energies, might stand as a metaphor for the whole social enterprise of the church. Indeed, they ought to so stand, for the pastors often use sports as such a metaphor themselves. At a Lynchburg Christian Academy athletic-awards banquet whose theme was “Steppin’ Up to Victory,” Edward Dobson, the good-looking young dean of students at Liberty Baptist College, gave an after-dinner sermon on sports and the Christian life. He said that when he was a soccer player he used to spend hours—sometimes eight hours at a time—practicing one shot; he would give up everything else to do it. Well, he said, success in the Christian life is like success in sports: you have to discipline yourself to give up everything that might interfere or prove an obstacle. What you need is discipline, devotion, and consistency. There are Christians who start up fast, who read the Bible and go to church a lot, but then quit. But you can’t quit, because “whenever you quit you become a loser.” Keep your eye on the goal, keep running consistently, and “one day you will cross the finish line and stand before Jesus Christ.” Later, one of the coaches made another point: “The whole purpose of junior-high-school soccer is to instill a Christlike attitude into young men,” he said.

School athletic banquets do tend to call up sports metaphors, but Thomas Road pastors talk about sports on all sorts of occasions. They probably talk about them as much as Anglican schoolmasters—which is a lot—but they talk about them in a different way. Where the Anglican headmaster will go on about how it’s not whether you win or lose but how you play the game, Thomas Road pastors will tell kids to get out there and win. Grace under pressure, aristocratic prowess, even fair play are not virtues they are much interested in. “God wants you to be a champion,” Falwell once told an assembly of his college students. “He wants you to be a victor for God’s glory. A champion is not an individual star but one of a team who knows how to function with others. Men of God are not interested in gaining personal fame. The man of God says, “I will be the best for God in the place where He puts me.’ ” Such sports talk does not suggest the manor house or the high commissioner’s residence any more than it suggests software and SoHo lofts. It suggests the steel mills and the values of nineteenth-century American capitalism.

Success and how to get it are major themes in Thomas Road preaching. Falwell himself likes to preach from Paul’s Epistles to Timothy—from the letters in which the older evangelist gives the younger one some sound practical advice. For one sermon, Falwell chose the text “Let no man despise thy youth; but be thou an example of the believers, in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity.” In his commentary, he said he often told younger preachers that “nothing is more important to you than moral purity,” and explained to them, “You can survive rumors of a money scandal, you can survive a split in the church . . . but if you break your marriage vows you will never fly so high again.” Falwell did not add “if you are caught at it,” but the advice is nothing if not a piece of worldly wisdom. In his sermons, his terms of reference often modulate in this fashion from Heaven to earth—from how to be a better Christian to how to improve yourself and gain the respect of others. He promises no miracles; his philosophy is simply that material wealth “is God’s way of blessing people who put Him first.”

When Falwell is addressing his congregation on Wednesday evenings, he often talks about what he has done during the week. He talks about all the important people he has met on his trips around the country. He talks about New York and the narrow escapes he has had among the denizens of Sin City. He talks about his trips abroad—his visits to Israel, Thailand, Taiwan, and southern Africa—picturing himself on the front lines of conflict, and quoting what he said to high officials and heads of state. The obvious inferiority of the natives in these places does not at all appear to dispel the glamour of them for his congregation.

Last summer, Falwell posed for a Newsweek photographer beside his swimming pool on the green lawn in front of the imposing white house he lives in. That the shot might be bad publicity did not occur to him at the time, for his own people know all about that house and the way he lives. At Christmas, Falwell sends out color photographs of himself, his wife, and their three children (whose first names all begin with “J”) in posh surroundings or posed in formal dress. His own people love to look at these pictures, for they think he deserves everything he has. They love to hear about his travels, for his account of them brings those faraway people and places somehow within their reach. They think themselves fortunate to be in the church with the television cameras where this man broadcasts to the nation. Furthermore, they love to hear him talk about himself, for when he talks about his early life he makes it clear that he is not some pale, prissy, holier-than-thou minister but—underneath his celebrity—someone much like them.

Falwell has said a good deal about his early life, in sermons and in books he distributes as advertisements for himself and his enterprises. As in all biographies, certain facts have been selected for publication and others left out. According to “Aflame for God,” by Gerald Strober and Ruth Tomczak, Falwell was born, with a twin brother, Gene, to Carey and Helen Falwell on August 11, 1933. (“Although it was impossible to predict at the time, one of the most crucial dates in the history of the town...”) The family, which included two children—Virginia and Lewis—considerably older than the twins, lived in a white frame house a mile and a half east of a section of downtown Lynchburg called Fairview Heights. The earliest photograph in the book shows Jerry and Gene aged about two, Jerry in the arms of a man in overalls and a work-stained shirt, with a high-crowned dark hat pulled down over his weather-beaten face. The man is Jerry’s grandfather Charles Falwell, and the family resemblance is striking. In later life, Jerry would have the same strong features, the same powerful, confident stance. A photograph of Jerry’s father, by contrast, shows a slight man in a three-piece suit with a pained expression on his face. Jerry’s older brother and sister are not pictured, but there is a photograph of his mother taken on Mother’s Day of 1971 and showing an ample-breasted woman with her hair pulled back beneath a black hat, wearing a printed black silk dress.

This book and other biographical accounts do not say very much about the Falwell family. There is no reason that they should, but the family history does have a certain sociological interest. Charles Falwell was a dairy farmer whose family had settled in the hills east of Lynchburg in the mid-nineteenth century, and had farmed in the narrow bottomland between the steep hills. Around 1900, with the industrialization of Lynchburg, mill hands and factory workers came to settle among the farmers along the railroad line. Fairview Heights—the new settlement—was a poor neighborhood, even in 1920; it had no paved roads and no street lights, and the houses had no running water. It was also a rough neighborhood. During the Prohibition era, the gentlefolk of Lynchburg used to frighten their daughters with tales of crime, vice, and white slavery in Fairview Heights. The tales were exaggerated but not without foundation, for four or five bootleggers who had sizable operations there had effectively closed it off to the law. “If you didn’t live there, you didn’t go there,” Gene Falwell recalls.

Carey Falwell was the oldest in a family of boys. He had only a sixth-grade education, but he was a shrewd, hard-driving man, and before the twins were born he had managed to start a succession of small businesses. He financed bootlegging operations, and at various times he owned a service station, an oil dealership, and a small trucking company. The house Jerry was born in was a gentleman’s house that Carey had moved piece by piece from Rivermont, the wealthy section of town. He was driven by ambition. In the early thirties, along with his other enterprises, he set up a dance hall called the Merry Garden, with a restaurant and “tourist court” across the street. In 1931, he had shot and killed his brother Garland in the heat of an argument, apparently in self-defense. Around the time the twins were born (their birth, apparently, was not planned for), he went broke and had to sell his businesses to his brother Warren. His reverses and his remorse over the death of his brother drove him to despair and to drink. Eventually, he pulled himself and his family back from the brink of bankruptcy, but he continued to drink, and he died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1948, when Jerry was only fifteen.

“Aflame for God” says of Jerry’s twin brother, Gene, that he “would follow in his father’s footsteps and become an aggressive, successful businessman and, along with his older brother Lewis, consolidate and add to the family’s extensive commercial interests.” The description could be more accurate. Some of the Falwells did very well in life. Calvin and Lawrence, the sons of Carey’s more stable brother Warren, took the small businesses they had inherited and built up a series of successful enterprises, including a well-drilling company, a trucking firm, and an aviation company. Genial, hardworking, and civic-minded, Calvin became one of Lynchburg’s city fathers; he is a member of the Chamber of Commerce and the president of the New York Mets farm team. But Jerry is the only real success in his immediate family. His brother Lewis has an excavation company, and Gene, who lives in the “home place,” where they grew up, runs a trailer park on the Falwell land. Calvin, an outgoing man with a soft Virginia drawl, speaks affectionately of Gene: “Aggressive? He’s the most easygoing kind of guy you’d ever want to meet. Never gets mad. Has all the time in the world for you. I suppose he hasn’t worn a tie since his mother’s funeral. In fact, I’m sure he hasn’t. Like someone once said to me, ‘I guess Jerry got the other half.’ ”

The Falwell “home place” isn’t far from the main commercial road, but the white house stands alone in a small pasture between two thickly wooded hills. “Jerry always said he wanted a house up there,” Gene told me, pointing to the top of a steep little hill. Gene is in and out of the house all day; he’ll go to fix an electric wire in someone’s trailer or help a brother-in-law prune a maple tree. A homebody who likes to hunt and fish and to make things grow, he can tell you in detail how to make maple sugar or how people make moonshine in a still. An unself-conscious man, he will also tell you how his grandpa used to make fun of the “colored boys” who worked for him. Gene’s wife, Jo Ann, who keeps the house, with its shag rugs and its modern kitchen, so neat it looks uninhabited, has clearly not been able to do very much about Gene’s clothes or the stubble on his chin. While Jo Ann goes to the Thomas Road Church and Calvin is a charter member of a rather more relaxed Baptist church, Gene stays home on Sunday, like his father and his grandfather before him.

The contrast between the twins became obvious in their early years. The boys entered elementary school together, but after a year Jerry skipped a grade, leaving Gene behind for the rest of their school careers. Jerry was good at schoolwork; he was particularly good at spelling and math, and he used to finish his tests fifteen minutes before the other kids. Since he had an almost photographic memory, he did not have to work hard, yet he did, for he wanted to be the best. In his junior year in high school, he entered the state spelling championship; when he lost because he could not recognize an unfamiliar word, he went back and read through an entire college edition of a dictionary. “He didn’t like farm work,” Gene recalls. “He’d leave me with the chores. When the time came, he always had something else to do. He never wanted to come out trapping with me, either. He’d have his head in a book or he’d be out playing baseball.” Jerry liked the sociable, competitive sports, and he was a good athlete. In his senior year in high school, he was captain of the football team. While Gene dropped out of school in his senior year and soon after joined the Navy, Jerry graduated with a 98.6 per cent average and was named class valedictorian.

Jerry was not allowed to give the valedictory speech, however, because school auditors discovered that he had taken cafeteria tickets and for some time had been handing them out to members of the football team. That incident was the last straw for the school authorities. Jerry had been in trouble with them for years. In grade school, he once set a snake loose in the classroom, and another time he put a large rat in a teacher’s desk drawer. Later on, in high school, he and some friends tied up the gym teacher and locked him in the basement. Jerry was, as his biographies put it, a prankster. Out of school, he and Gene used to hang around the Royal Café in Fairview Heights with a gang of boys who for fun would do things like piling a family’s porch furniture on the roof of the house. They didn’t like it when boys from other parts of town tried to date girls from Fairview Heights, so every week or so there would be fights with neighboring gangs. In a recent sermon called “My Testimony,” Falwell described these fistfights and said that he and a close friend, Jim Moon (now co-pastor at the Thomas Road Church), used to spend days and nights away from home, in “places it’s not necessary to talk about, doing things it’s not necessary to talk about.”

Moon recalls that Jerry was always a leader among the Fairview boys, and that he was so in part because he had the only car and he was generous with it. Like so many leaders, Falwell seemed to have need of followers. At the same time, he was different from them, in that he knew what he wanted. “I didn’t have any aspirations,” Moon said to me. “I don’t remember wanting anything or hoping for anything except to grow up. There weren’t many opportunities back then. You could go to work at the hosiery mill, the foundry, or the shoe factory. There wasn’t much else. When I was sixteen, I was drinking a lot. But Jerry, he always wanted to be an engineer, and he was willing to do whatever was necessary to be the best.”

In 1950, Falwell entered Lynchburg College and began to take courses that would lead to a major in mechanical engineering. His plan was to transfer to Virginia Polytechnic Institute in his junior year, and by the end of his sophomore year there seemed to be no reason he should not do it: he had the highest math average in the college that year. But by fall he was enrolled in Baptist Bible College, in Springfield, Missouri, and was on his way to becoming a pastor. Just how he came to this decision is not clear.

The Falwells were not pious people. When Jerry was growing up, the men seemed to regard religion as something that women did. Jerry’s mother (described in “Aflame for God” as “a stern disciplinarian, but . . . kind, gracious, and loving”) used to take the twins to Sunday school when she went to church; but as soon as she had deposited them they would slip out the back and run to an uncle’s house to read the comics until it was time for her to pick them up. According to Falwell’s biographies, his only exposure to religion until he was eighteen came from listening—involuntarily—to Charles F. Fuller, a fundamentalist Baptist whose “Old-Fashioned Revival Hour” was the most popular religious radio program of the day. Jerry’s mother, so the story goes, would turn the program on every Sunday morning, and he and his brother would be too lazy to get up and turn it off. In January of his sophomore year, Jerry went with a group of friends, including Jim Moon, to the Park Avenue Baptist Church, in Lynchburg, for Sunday-evening services. After the service, he, Moon, and a number of others responded to the altar call and—as he says—accepted Christ. Under the instruction of a youth pastor, Jerry began reading the Bible, attending church services, and participating in church activities. “From January to March . . . I got my salvation established, and then from March to about July, I got my call to full-time service established,” Falwell has said.

At least one of the Falwell biographies says that Jerry and his friends went to that initial service at Park Avenue Baptist mainly because they had heard there were some pretty girls in the congregation. The story is wholly plausible, for Jerry later married the pretty young church pianist, Macel Pate, and Moon married the organist. But in “My Testimony” Falwell said that he went not only because of the pretty girls but also because he was already thinking of founding a church on his own. How he would have conceived of such a plan if, as he says, he had not heard the Bible preached in a church before is difficult to imagine. But then, according to Fairview Heights people, he had attended other churches—usually on Sunday nights with his friends. He had simply not been to a fundamentalist church before. In any case, Jerry did not seem to go through any moral or spiritual turmoil when he made his commitment. By his own account, he made a career decision.

Baptist Bible College was little more than a group of quonset huts with the most Spartan of living arrangements. Falwell says that it was there that he met a number of “great preachers” with churches of three and four thousand people. He would, he says, follow these preachers around and run errands for them, to be near them and to learn as much as he could. He studied hard, but he did not give up his pranks. Once, he drove a motorcycle through the boys’ dormitory at midnight. Another time, he ran a garden hose into a friend’s room and flooded it. After his friend had spent three hours cleaning the water up, Falwell came in and emptied a five-gallon can of water onto the floor. (“He has an aggressive nature,” his biographers comment.) Macel Pate was now engaged to one of his roommates. Falwell managed “to get the other ring off her finger,” according to one account, in part by tearing up letters to her that the roommate gave him to mail. Macel, however, did not marry him until he was established in Lynchburg five years later.

According to the biographies, the first real crisis in Falwell’s life came during his Bible-college career. He had asked to teach a Sunday-school class of eleven-year-olds in the local Baptist church, but because after some weeks he still had only one student the church superintendent threatened to take away his classbook. Jerry then began to go every afternoon to an unused room on the third floor of the college’s administration building, where he would pray for several hours, “crying out to God” for help with the class. On Saturdays, he went through all the parks and playgrounds in the town looking for eleven-year-olds, and by the time the school year was over, in May, he had fifty-six of them in his class.

In 1954, Falwell took a year out of college to work at the Park Avenue Baptist Church. In 1956, he returned to Lynchburg at the end of his senior year and, though he had received an offer to go elsewhere, decided to start a new church there with thirty-five dissident members of Park Avenue Baptist. He and his new congregation found an empty building on Thomas Road—it had recently been vacated by the Donald Duck Bottling Company—and spent several days scrubbing the cola syrup off the walls. A week after the first service in the church, Falwell began a half-hour Sunday broadcast for a new local radio station. Not long afterward, he began a daily radio program and a live Sunday-evening broadcast from a local television station. With these two broadcasts and the morning and evening Sunday services in his church, Falwell was for some time preaching four sermons every Sunday, beginning at 6:30 A.M. and ending around 9:00 P.M. On weekdays, he would go from door to door visiting each house in an ever-expanding radius from the church. In a year, his congregation went from thirty-five people to eight hundred and sixty-four.

Falwell lays no claim to great originality as a preacher. When he speaks about the sources of his faith, his vocation, or his evangelistic style, he always makes much of Charles F. Fuller and his “Old-Fashioned Revival flour;” he also speaks of Dwight Moody, Billy Sunday, and the Southern preachers he took for mentors at Baptist Bible College. In the fundamentalist tradition, his theology is wholly orthodox; it is the religion of independent Baptist preachers throughout the Bible Belt. His preaching style is similarly conventional. Falwell does not have the flamboyance of a Billy Sunday—he has no real love for the language—nor does he have the soothing, media-modern style of charismatics like Oral Roberts and Pat Robertson. He is a pithy, old-fashioned preacher—a man who has made himself out of the traditional cloth. What distinguishes him among his peers is his organizational talent and his enormous, driving energy.

In “Church Aflame,” a book he wrote with Elmer Towns, the vice-president of Liberty Baptist College, the authors explain in some detail how Falwell organized the Thomas Road Church and built its membership into the thousands. His method was simply to use every available medium at once—the telephone, the printing press, personal contacts, broadcasting. In the late fifties and early sixties, he devoted himself to building up the church’s capacities for what he calls “saturation evangelism.” He put his parishioners to work on the phones. He bought a printing press and, with the help of church members, printed announcements, leaflets, and, finally, a newspaper. He then set up a telephone bank and also began to produce tape cassettes for sale. As his congregation increased, he would raise money, build new facilities, and then cast out a larger net for new members. In 1964, he completed the construction of a thousand-seat auditorium for his church services; from that year on, he acquired a new piece of land or built a new building almost every year. In 1967, he founded Lynchburg Christian Academy. In 1972, he brought nineteen thousand people to the Lynchburg Municipal Stadium for a Sunday-school meeting.

For twelve years—from 1956 to 1968—Falwell preached in his own church on Sundays and then went to a television station (first to the one in Lynchburg and later to one in Roanoke, sixty miles away) to preach a sermon for broadcast locally. In 1968, he was able to buy black-and-white television cameras and to tape one of the Sunday services in his church—at once easing his own incredible preaching schedule and providing a format for a television program. Two years later, shortly after the current Thomas Road church building was completed, he bought color-television cameras. Once he was in control of the production of his program, he and his brother-in-law, Sam K. Pate, bought time for the program on local television stations in the East and then throughout the country; following the practice of Oral Roberts, Rex Humbard, and others, they set up a direct-mail funding operation to defray the costs of production and distribution. In 1971, Falwell bought time on two hundred television stations; his revenues that year reached a million dollars.

“Church Aflame” might serve as a how-to-do-it guide for the ambitious young evangelist if it were not for one important lacuna: money-raising. In this and other books, Falwell discusses the tithing of the local congregation, but he is silent on how to raise money from a television audience. On this subject, he has said, “We try to do everything that General Motors does to sell automobiles. Except that we do it better, maybe”—a statement that is not only too general to be helpful but also not quite accurate.

Falwell’s fund-raising pitches on television (he makes them himself—an uncommon practice among television evangelists) suggest not General Motors ads but cereal-box-top offers. Send in nine-ninety-five and you will receive, in addition to your own special volume of inspirational literature, a perfectly free gratis Jesus First pin. Or: Become a Faith Partner—send in ten dollars a month and receive our four-color magazine of faith, Faith Aflame. Alternatively, here are two free Jesus First pins—wear them always—and send fifteen, twenty-five, a hundred dollars a month to help our Liberty Baptist students or our crusade against sin. You will receive our Crusader’s Passport. Call Jerry Falwell toll-free and share your need with one of our counsellors.

Some of the pitches are more sophisticated. Last spring, Falwell was offering seven volumes of inspirational literature—the package, wrapped in silver paper with ribbon tied in a bow, looked extraordinarily like a gift-wrapped package from a liquor store. Celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Thomas Road Church, Falwell said, and send in a hundred dollars now, or twenty-five dollars for four months, to help with the construction of much-needed buildings at Liberty Baptist. He explained that the package contained the books that, apart from the Bible, had most influenced his spiritual life. One can only assume that these books were out of print and so reissued for the anniversary—which was in fact the church’s twenty-fourth.

Falwell himself dreams up a good many of these pitches, but, as this particular appeal suggests, there are also a number of professionals at work on his fund-raising. Since 1973, he has employed an advertising agency and a Massachusetts computer-consulting firm called Epsilon Data Management, both of which have what they call “inputs on the creative side.” The main job of Epsilon Data Management is to help coördinate the mailings. Through this firm, Falwell can make appeals to a variety of different constituencies with a series of computer-printed letters appropriate to each. One set of appeals, for example, stresses patriotism, another missionary work, another the menace of pornography and homosexuality. Through Epsilon, Falwell manages four different “clubs,” whose members contribute to his various ministries monthly sums averaging about twenty dollars. His hundred and seventy thousand Faith Partners and the forty thousand members of his I Love America Club contribute to the general “Gospel Hour” fund; the members of his Founders Club and his 15,000 Club give money for buildings and for scholarships, respectively, at Liberty Baptist College. Falwell’s televised appeals alternate among these various constituencies.

On occasion, Falwell will make appeals for causes outside his own ministries, but the giver must beware. Last year, Falwell flew to Thailand to visit a refugee camp, where he was photographed in a bush jacket holding a Cambodian child in his arms. Thereafter, he made a series of appeals on television for the Indo-Chinese refugees. In March of 1980, he sent out an urgent letter describing in heartrending detail the plight of the Vietnamese boat people and appealing for emergency funds to buy food and medical supplies. On page 2 of the letter, the recipient would discover that the first hundred thousand dollars from that appeal would go to the boat people and the balance would go to “The Old-Time Gospel Hour.” (This spring, two similar appeals were made on behalf of refugees in Somalia.) A special newsletter sent out around the same period included photographs of starving Cambodian refugees and a description of their plight. In this newsletter, Falwell asked for twenty-five, fifty, or a hundred dollars from each recipient to help start the Liberty Missionary Society, “which will reach out to lost, hurting, and hungry souls around the world.” To examine the budget for the society in the newsletter was, however, to see that the appeal would bring the starving Cambodians no food and no medicine at all. The budget—two million dollars—showed, for instance, four hundred and fifty thousand dollars to support Liberty Baptist students on short-term missionary service in eighteen countries, thirty-seven thousand five hundred dollars to buy air time for “The Old-Time Gospel Hour” in countries outside the United States and Canada, and four hundred and fifty thousand for capital expenditures on Liberty Baptist College. A hundred thousand dollars was promised for “foreign Bible distribution.”

These fund-raising techniques have proved remarkably successful. In fiscal 1979, “The Old-Time Gospel Hour” raised thirty-five million dollars from the two and a half million people on its mailing lists. The financial management of the church has been rather less than successful, though, and over the years Falwell has had his troubles with it. In the early seventies, his organization floated bond issues worth six and a half million dollars. In 1973, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued the combined ministries for “fraud and deceit,” charging that the church was insolvent and could not redeem the bonds when they came due. In court, the judge absolved the church of intentional wrongdoing, and the S.E.C. lawyers dropped the words “fraud and deceit” from their complaint. Falwell thereupon declared a great victory. The church, however, had admitted in the course of the trial that one of its bond prospectuses was inaccurate and that its general ledgers were incomplete. The financial affairs of the church were put in the hands of five prominent Lynchburg businessmen; that is, into what was for a nonprofit institution the equivalent of receivership.

On assuming responsibility for the finances of the Thomas Road ministries, the businessmen found that the scant records the church did have were in a state of confusion. In the next three years, they instituted proper accounting procedures, cut overhead costs, let a number of “Gospel Hour” administrators go (including Falwell’s brother-in-law), and, perhaps most important, adopted a cost-effective system for buying radio and television time. “The Old-Time Gospel Hour” had been buying “packages” of air time almost at random from brokers, when the tried-and-true system for evangelists was to persuade a local group to finance the purchase of air time on a local station for thirteen weeks and drop it if contributions did not then cover the cost. Between 1973 and 1977, “Gospel Hour” revenues rose from seven million dollars a year to twenty-two million, and in May of 1977 the committee of businessmen was able to retire most of the church’s unsecured indebtedness and hand the management back to Falwell and his staff.

Three years later, the church was again in financial trouble. Its balance sheet for the fiscal year ending in June of 1980 showed that it had assets of forty-one million dollars, of which thirty-six million were sunk into property, plant, and equipment; it showed mortgages and liabilities amounting to nineteen million dollars. In August of 1980, the church borrowed three and a half million dollars more through a bond issue. Its ability to service its debt depended entirely on Falwell’s ability to bring in money, particularly through “The Old-Time Gospel Hour.” In the fiscal year 1979, he had brought in six million seven hundred thousand dollars above operating expenses—sufficient funds to service the debt. But in the fiscal year 1980 “Gospel Hour” income did not increase as much as expected, and the operating expenses rose, giving the whole organization a net of only three million eight hundred thousand dollars. Since the church had few assets apart from its own buildings and grounds, the whole enterprise of the Thomas Road Church began to look shaky.

How the church could have got into such debt when its total revenues had continued to rise each year—from twenty-two million two hundred thousand dollars in fiscal 1977 to fifty-one million in fiscal 1980—was an interesting question. In 1973, when the businessmen took over the organization they made an extensive investigation of its bank accounts—personal and institutional—and found no evidence of hanky-panky. What they did find—in addition to a lack of any financial management—was deficit spending, on the one hand, and a great deal of waste and inefficiency, on the other. Some in Lynchburg therefore concluded that the organization had simply fallen back into its old ways. “Jerry’s always criticizing the government for overspending,” a businessman close to him said. “But he is the biggest deficit spender of them all. There’s no end to what he would like to do, and he doesn’t know how to say no to anyone.”

The theory concerning deficit spending bears some examination, for Falwell is clearly an ambitious man, who is always out ahead of himself, his vision always exceeding his present possibilities. He himself has rather proudly said that he has never had the money to complete any project that he began. He founded Liberty Baptist College in 1971, when the church was millions of dollars in debt; and last summer, when it was in the throes of a new financial crisis, he was talking about putting up a new church building for ten thousand people, a college for fifty thousand students, and apartments for thousands of elderly people. Clearly, Falwell would like to do everything at once. But what he actually does with his money is the real point at issue.

Figures from Falwell’s organization show that “The Old-Time Gospel Hour” raised about a hundred and fifteen million dollars in four years—fiscal 1977 through fiscal 1980—and that virtually none of this money went toward the operating expenses of the Thomas Road Church; the local congregation paid for most of the church’s expenses with tithes. In those four years, Falwell put a total of sixteen million dollars into the construction of the L.B.C. campus, and each year he put about two million dollars into the operating expenses of the college. The bulk of the revenues, however, went back into “The Old-Time Gospel Hour,” for its own operations.

So in the scheme of things Falwell gave a rather high priority to “The Old-Time Gospel Hour” and a rather low one to the comfort and education of his college students. As the businessmen who took over his organization found out, although “The Old-Time Gospel Hour” is the fund-raising arm and the vehicle for further expansion, it was the college that attracted a sizable percentage of the contributions. The businessmen had wanted to close the college for prudential reasons but had found that, for the same prudential reasons, they could not. As a result, the college had two entirely independent existences for its first six years—one on paper, the other in reality—and the students fell into the gap between the two. Falwell advertised the college on television. He sent out a catalog with a picture of what seemed to be a bosky campus; one of his books of the period pictures students playing basketball in a gymnasium. When the students came to Lynchburg—first three hundred, then a thousand, then two thousand strong—what they found was a series of dilapidated rented buildings scattered around the city. There was no campus (the catalog photo was of a city park), no gymnasium (the college used gyms belonging to a public high school and to Lynchburg Christian Academy), and, for the first few years, no library. (Falwell’s students used the Randolph-Macon and Lynchburg College libraries until there were complaints about their attempts to proselytize other students.) Some of the students took pride in their ability to survive these hardships, but others left. Finally, in 1977, Falwell was able to begin the construction of the campus, and the students were finally installed on it. When I was there last summer, however, the campus consisted mainly of a collection of prefabs made of cinder block and metal sheeting. Since then, a few new buildings faced with brick have been added. Those students who live on campus must sleep on bunk beds, four to each tiny room.

Whether one judges the “Gospel Hour” to be an efficient operation or not depends on whether one categorizes it as a direct-mail business or as a church. In fiscal 1979, for example, when its receipts were thirty-five million dollars, its operating expenses were nearly twenty-six million dollars. The fund-raising vehicle itself spent more than five dollars for every seven dollars it earned. Of course, many of those who send in money are contributing to the program itself. Thus, the cost of air time—nine million dollars in fiscal 1979—and the cost of production are the very objects of their charity. But in fiscal 1979 “The Old-Time Gospel Hour” spent nearly eleven million dollars for direct mail and promotion. It had other administrative costs, which included the payroll and employee benefits for some eight hundred people. Falwell himself makes only forty-two thousand five hundred dollars a year in salary, but his organization pays a number of his expenses—including the maintenance of his twelve-room house (deeded to the church by a wealthy businessman) and the cost of a private jet. Therefore, Falwell’s contributors, in 1979, paid roughly forty cents of every dollar they gave for administrative costs.

There is no evidence of any illegality in these practices. Still, Falwell’s organization has engaged in certain transactions that most businesses and nonprofit institutions would avoid. In the fiscal year 1980, it bought a million and a half dollars’ worth of gift offers and other materials from a company whose president was a member of its own board, and it also borrowed a million dollars from a board member. It currently employs an agency run by Falwell’s brother-in-law to buy its media time. All these transactions may have worked to the advantage of “The Old-Time Gospel Hour”; there is some evidence in each case that they have. But that is surely not true of a decision made in the summer of 1979 to transfer all the health-insurance policies for “Gospel Hour” employees from Blue Cross/Blue Shield to a “Christian” company that turned out to be inadequately financed and had been legally barred from doing business in another state. Another company now handles those policies.

There may be no illegality within the Falwell organization, but there is very often a disquieting difference between what Falwell says is happening and what is actually going on. In October of 1979, for instance, Falwell informed his supporters through his newspaper and by direct mail that he would have to take “The Old-Time Gospel Hour” off the air “unless God definitely shows me that he wants us to continue in this media.” Therefore, he wrote, “I am putting out the fleece.” (He carefully explained that the reference was to Gideon and the salvation of Israel.) He asked for fasting and prayer and six and a half million dollars. When a reporter questioned him about the announcement, Falwell said, in effect, that he had exaggerated a bit—that he did not intend to take the program off the air but merely to reduce the number of stations from which he bought air time; and that the six and a half million dollars represented only a million dollars more than “The Old-Time Gospel Hour” had brought in the previous October. In November, Falwell announced that he had raised the six and a half million and the crisis was over.

Whether or not Falwell actually raised all of that money, the crisis was not over; it was just beginning. He had called a moratorium on further construction of the L.B.C. campus in October—at the time of the crisis call—and it remained in effect until July of 1980. Yet in 1980—and this was yet another indication of his priorities—his expenditure for air time actually increased. “The Old-Time Gospel Hour” picked up some fifty television stations last year, and in addition Falwell produced three television specials and bought air time for them on two hundred stations around the country. Also, in the spring of 1980 he spent two million dollars to buy the entire shopping plaza in which the “Gospel Hour” offices were situated.

In June of 1980, Falwell refused to pay sixty-seven thousand dollars in local real-estate taxes owed on the land occupied by L.B.C. but owned by “The Old-Time Gospel Hour” which was not, for these purposes, tax-exempt. When the city dunned him for the unpaid real-estate taxes, he told his congregation that the city was discriminating against the Thomas Road Church and that he would not pay “until all churches and colleges in Lynchburg pay taxes”—a phrase suggesting that the land belonged to the college or the church. Around the same time, the chief executive officer of “The Old-Time Gospel Hour” told the local press that the church owned no property of enterprise in Lynchburg not “involved in the ministry of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” At that time, however, “The Old-Time Gospel Hour” was leasing space to a supermarket, a gift shop, and a restaurant-bar in the shopping plaza that contained its offices.

Falwell’s financial troubles—and the confusion that he creates around them—can be understood only in the context of the relationships that exist between him and his congregation and between that congregation and the outside world. In 1979, the dean of the Liberty Baptist Seminary resigned after a doctrinal dispute with Falwell. When, in the course of the dispute, Falwell questioned his administrative abilities, the dean angrily responded that it was Falwell who was the poor manager, creating financial crisis after financial crisis. He also accused Falwell of running a dictatorship. The last accusation was a curious one for the dean to make, since fundamentalist churches are generically dictatorships. Most Baptist churches—including most of those which belong to the Southern Baptist Convention—are governed by their lay members; they have deacons or committees of laymen to oversee the finances of the church and to hire and are the pastors. But independent Baptist churches are run by their pastors. Falwell has always run the Thomas Road Church, and he has always insisted on his own absolute rule. In a sermon titled “The Day of Great Men Has Not Passed,” he said, “God’s plan is that His flock is to be led by shepherds, not run by a board or a committee.” He explained:

God never intended for a committee nor a board of deacons nor any other group to dominate a church or control a pastor. The pastor is God’s man, God’s servant, God’s leader. When you tie the hands of God’s man, when you keep him from acting as the holy Spirit leads him, you have murdered his initiative, you have killed his spirit.

This system of governance might seem out of place in a church that democratically assumes that anyone can attain salvation without the intervention of the pastor. But just as fundamentalist theology posits the absolute authority of the Bible, fundamentalist moral doctrines posit the absolute authority of pastors, teachers, fathers, “civil authority,” and so on. In “God’s chain of command,” there are no relationships of equality but only superiors and inferiors, authority and obedience. While fundamentalist theology exists quite independent of individual pastors, individual pastors do tend to impose their own personal authority.

“This Jim Jones thing haunts everyone,” Jackie Gould told me. She was the second person in Falwell’s congregation to bring Jones’ name up to me. The first was a professor who worked with the Moral Majority. “Imagine a spectrum that runs from a Jim Jones cult on the one hand to the most arid of liberal churches on the other,” the professor said. “Well, some of the big fundamentalist churches in the South would fall close—dangerously close—to the Jim Jones end of the spectrum. I know because I used to belong to one of them. I got out, but it was a terrible culture shock. The question is, of course, where Dr. Falwell’s church would fit in this spectrum. It is one of the religious kingdoms of the South. But in my view it is one of the most liberal and progressive of them.”

It is true that Falwell’s church is nothing like a Jim Jones cult. Lynchburg people outside the church do not even make the association, for they can see perfectly well that the congregation runs too much to Tupperware and to careers in Babcock & Wilcox or the military. Among the thousands who come to visit the Thomas Road Church each year, there are a few Flannery O’Connor guilt-ridden crazies with stones in their boots (Falwell has concrete walls around his house and a guard) and a few sweet-Jesus people who arrive at the welfare office saying that God has sent them and will the state please get them home. But most of the visitors are families in big Chevies or couples on Super-Saver fares who have come East to see an aunt and, incidentally, to drop in on the church that they watch on television. Among the resident church members are some who moved to Lynchburg just to join the Thomas Road Church. But these people also came to go to college, to train in church work, or to send their children to a “Christian” school. They came to live and work within a big, well-organized church.

All the same, there is something a bit exotic about Falwell’s congregation. The L.B.C. women, with their mid-calf dresses, and the L.B.C. men, with their clipped hair and white shirts, present an obvious contrast to all the other college students in Lynchburg. But it is not just a matter of appearances. If you ask a Thomas Road member “What brought you to Lynchburg?” or “How did you find this house?” the answer will be “God brought me here” or “God found this house for us”—and only after that will come some mention of the family’s desire for a warmer climate or of the intervention of a real-estate agent. Such answers might indicate passivity or a sense of helplessness if it were not that Thomas Road people always seem to know exactly what God wants. This moon-child quality is far more pronounced in some people than in others, but all the Thomas Road people seem to have the same opinions about what God wants for society at large. As an outsider soon discovers, there is no real point in talking to more than one of them on a topic of general interest, for there is a right answer to every question, and Nancy James or William Sheehan can give it to you as well as any of the pastors. Or, if that particular person can’t, it’s simply because he or she lacks the specific information. “I’m totally against the E.R.A.,” Nancy James told me during a visit I paid to her house. When, for the purposes of discussion, I recited some of the pro-E.R.A. arguments, she listened seriously and apologized for being so uninformed on the subject. I thought at the time that the arguments had made some impression on her, but later, as I was leaving, she came out after me to apologize again and to say, “I will find out more about the E.R.A. I know I’m against it. I’m just not sure exactly why.”

For Thomas Road people, education—in the broad sense of the word—is not a moral and intellectual quest that involves struggle and uncertainty. It is simply the process of learning, or teaching, the right answers. The idea that an individual should collect evidence and decide for himself is anathema. Last spring, Falwell told his congregation that to read anything but the Bible and certain prescribed works of interpretation was at best a waste of time. He said that he himself read all the national magazines, just to keep up with what others were saying, but that, there was no reason for others to do so. (His church members seem to follow this advice faithfully; their weakness, when they have any, is in the realm of television watching.) He and his fellow-pastors attack the public schools for teaching “immorality,” “secular humanism,” and other evils. But what bothers the most pious members of his congregation is not just that the schools teach the wrong answers; it is that the schools do not protect children from information that might call their beliefs into question. When I asked Jackie Gould whether she would consider sending her children to something other than a Bible college, she said, “No, because our eternal destiny is all-important, so you can’t take a chance. College so often throws kids into confusion.” The purpose of education, then, is progress in one direction, to the exclusion of all others.

As a result, book learning in the Liberty Baptist Schools is severely limited. The entire library of Lynchburg Christian Academy would fit inside a few telephone booths; it contains one volume by Dickens but no Thackeray, no Melville, and no novels by any modernist writer. Liberty Baptist College has a library that was bought from a defunct college. It also has a tiny bookstore, and this displays books by L.B.C. faculty members, books by Billy Graham, books about Winston Churchill, and not much else, next to banks of taped sermons, boxes of stationery, and piles of T-shirts. In a Western-civilization class I attended at the summer school, the professor managed to get through the political, economic, cultural, and intellectual history of nineteenth-century Europe in two hours. While he dictated an outline of European history, the students obediently took notes, asking questions when they had not heard exactly what he said. Nationalism, utopian socialism, scientific socialism, Marxism, the professor said. Finally, a young man interrupted to ask, with a laugh, if there were really ever people who believed in socialism. Fourier, Blanqui, the professor answered, and then he wrote “Thesis, antithesis, synthesis” on the blackboard. A little later, a young woman raised her hand and asked who those people were. “Thesis, antithesis, synthesis,” the professor explained, adding that this represented the dictatorship of the proletariat.

At the Liberty Baptist Schools, students are protected both from information and from most logical processes. There is no formal ban on logic, but since analytical reasoning might lead to skepticism, and skepticism to the questioning of Biblical truth, it is simply not encouraged except in disciplines like engineering, where it could be expected to yield a single correct answer. (Not coincidentally, some of the brightest people I met at Thomas Road, including Falwell himself, had studied engineering.) In anything resembling human affairs, the intellectual discipline consists of moving word-sticks and fact-sticks from one pile to another with the minimum coefficient of friction. (“Could I put down ‘an end to oppression’ instead of ‘civil liberties’ on your exam?” one student asked the Western-civ professor. The professor said yes, he could.) Irony, ambiguity, and contradiction are treated somewhat like pornography: they should not exist, but if they do they should be avoided, or contagious diseases will follow. Casuistry is not unknown among fundamentalists, but for lack of intellectual exercise even pastors at Thomas Road sometimes cannot explain their own philosophy. I asked a pastor, a teacher, and a professor, in turn, what was meant by “situation ethics”—a term that fundamentalists use in excoriating the public schools—and none of them could define it. All three gave me examples not of situation ethics but of moral dilemmas. And they did so with great conviction, since in their world moral dilemmas do not exist. People familiar with fundamentalist colleges in the South would not find this intellectual rigidity surprising. On the contrary, they would be struck by the relative liberality of L.B.C. For example, Bob Jones University, in Greenville, South Carolina, which is the biggest of the fundamentalist colleges-cum-seminaries, takes the doctrine of withdrawal and separation far more seriously. The college has a fence around it, literally and figuratively. Until their senior year, female students are not allowed to go out without a chaperon, even for a visit to the dentist. By contrast with such strict-constructionist schools, L.B.C. is a worldly, sophisticated place, fraught with intellectual tension. For an outsider, the tension is difficult to appreciate, but what Falwell has said about the status of the college makes the contradictions clear.

Speaking to the incoming freshman class last summer, Falwell promised that L.B.C. would become an accredited college, with a degree that would stand on a par with a degree from Harvard or Yale. In the next breath, he said that the church would continue to control the college, and promised that the students would find no differences of opinion among faculty members. In the fall, he made good on his first promise. His administrators reluctantly spent the money to have the library moved up to the campus from downtown, and the college was accredited. Now, according to his administrators, the fear is that L.B.C. will eventually follow a lot of other religious colleges down the slippery slope toward academic freedom. It is for this reason, they explain, that “The Old-Time Gospel Hour” owns the land that L.B.C. stands on (and hence the fight over real-estate taxes). It is also for this reason that Falwell, speaking of the L.B.C. faculty, says things like “Any time they start teaching something we don’t like, we cut the money off. It’s amazing how that changes philosophy.”

The status of L.B.C. as an accredited, sectarian college points to the duality of Falwell’s own ambitions and to the paradox of his whole community. While Thomas Road people want separation, authority, and certainty, they also want career advancement, some worldly goods, and a little power in the society. The conflicting aims go a long way toward explaining the confusion of fundamentalist politics in the 1980 election. “Fundamentalists are evolving,” one Moral Majority administrator told me. “I know you must think that a strange word for me to use. But so be it. It’s the effect of television, the effect of education.” But then he added, “Of course, you won’t find many people who have been educated outside of Bible colleges, as I have.” And, in fact, the tensions and contradictions within the Thomas Road community are lost on most Lynchburg people, for what the church turns outward to the city is its hard shell.

In sheer size, the Thomas Road Church, with its related ministries, ranks as one of the most important institutions in Lynchburg. Its congregation is by far the city’s largest. However, of the eighteen thousand people Falwell numbers in his congregation, many are students or people who live outside the city limits. The congregation thus probably does not, as its pastors have sometimes claimed, comprise a quarter of the population of the city. With some thousand employees, the combined ministries are the fourth-largest private employer in town. L.B.C. now has three thousand students, many of whom live off campus. The church brings thousands of visitors to Lynchburg annually, and over the years it has brought the city hundreds of new residents. (Falwell’s administrators say that ten new members arrive in Lynchburg every week, but how many came to town because of the Thomas Road Church is not certain. As for the number who leave town every week, that is not a statistic that anyone collects.) Because of its size, the church has created traffic problems in the neighborhood and a few other low-level community frictions, but they are offset by the welcome business it has brought to the motels, taxi services, shops, and other establishments.

Other than the movement of people, however, the Thomas Read Church has had almost no impact on the life of the city. Since 1956, Falwell and his people have stood apart from city politics and from community projects of all sorts. The Thomas Road pastors do not belong to the local ministers’ organization; they take no part in ecumenical efforts, and are not known to make contributions to charities supported by other churches. Even the lay people tended to take no part in local politics or civic organizations until last year, when, for the first time, Thomas Road members voted in some numbers. In Lynchburg, this constitutes odd behavior, for the city is an exceptionally tight-knit, civic-minded place. Except for the Thomas Road people, the local politicians, businessmen, ministers, and college professors all know one another and, whatever their ideological or party differences, coöperate with one another on local affairs. While the relationship between Thomas Road and the city government has historically been correct, and even amicable, the civic leaders talk about the church as if it were a foreign country in the middle of their town. “It’s in Lynchburg, but it’s not of it,” one of them remarked.

For all the distance the Thomas Road church has kept, there are a great many people in Lynchburg who do not like Falwell or his church. The dislike is so general that it takes new members of the congregation very little time to experience it. The source of the irritation for most people is not political but personal: it is the attitude that Thomas Road members take toward those outside the church—the attitude that they themselves are always right and everyone else is always wrong. “Look how they park!” one householder on Thomas Road exclaimed, pointing to two cars carelessly pulled up on the lawn of a neighbor’s house one Sunday morning. “They think they’re justified in doing anything they want to do.”

The way most Lynchburg people meet Thomas Road members (or realize they have met them) is through the members’ proselytizing efforts. A number of Lynchburg churches engage in door-to-door evangelism, but the Thomas Road Church is by far the most aggressive of them. Not only the pastors but many parishioners as well spend a good deal of their time trying to convert others. Church members of all ages will evangelize at checkout counters, baseball games, and dinner parties—some requiring only the briefest of conversational openings before asking whether or not their interlocutor is “saved.” In addition, the church organizes groups to evangelize in hospitals, nursing homes, and neighborhoods across the city. Every Saturday morning, groups of ten to fifty Thomas Road people go out on campaigns, gathering first at the school for breakfast, prayers, and a briefing session.

One Saturday morning, I went out with a busload of seventh-grade girls to the Madison Heights section of town and walked with three of them from door to door up and down a suburban-looking street. Before the girls left on their mission, Lee Simmons, a teacher at Lynchburg Christian Academy, had read to them from the Bible and asked them to remember the wonderful experience they had when as children they accepted Christ into their lives. The three girls I accompanied did not, however, radiate much Christian compassion as they went about their task. When someone opened a door, they would settle their young faces into stern, adult expressions and start reading off questions from a little pink card they carried: “We are doing a religious survey. Are you a member of a religious group? . . . Do you attend its functions weekly, monthly, never? . . . How do you think a person gets to Heaven?” In the midst of this catechism, their interlocutors would usually plead another appointment and disappear into the house. But at one house the girls found a girl of about their own age out in the back yard. Cornering her, they asked, “If you were to die in the next instant, do you know that you would go to Heaven?”

The girl, who had been quietly sunbathing in the back yard, looked down and scraped her feet in embarrassment. “Well, yeah, I dunno, I guess I would, but I dunno exactly.”

The three girls fixed her with hawklike stares. “Well, wouldn’t you like to know?”

“Well, I know,” the leader of the team said, tossing her hair back proudly. “I’ve been saved. Wouldn’t you like to know?”

Now defenseless, the girl looked around for help, but found none. “Well, yeah, sure, I guess.”

The three seventh graders accepted her submission with icy detachment. “Are you now ready to accept Christ into your life?” one asked in a tone appropriate to the question “Are you ready to be blindfolded and shot?”

The girl never answered the question, for at that moment her older sister appeared from around the corner of the house, allowing her to beat a retreat.

The three girls lost their composure only once that morning, and that was when a woman who had recognized them as coming from “Jerry’s church” answered their questions forthrightly but treated the girls with the amused condescension that adults show when they buy lemonade from a little kid’s roadside stand. Later, walking away from her house, the girls regained their adult expressions and began to discuss the woman as if she were a problem case.

I said, “But surely she was ‘saved.’ She said that she had taken Christ into her heart many times.”

“She wasn’t saved,” one of the girls replied in a cold, superior voice. “You can take Christ into your heart only once.” And as she thought about the ignorance my remark revealed she looked at me with amazement and then with hostility.

Such aggressive evangelism must succeed with certain people, but it annoys a lot of others. The pastors are always preparing their flock to deal with negative reactions. Tim Setliff, a young pastor (formerly the driver of a beer truck), told a large group of people at the next breakfast briefing session that they should prepare for those many people in Lynchburg who would say they hated Jerry Falwell and the church. “But they don’t know Jerry Falwell,” he explained. “And you can’t hate someone you don’t know. These people don’t hate Falwell, and they don’t hate you, personally. They hate the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Setliff was not speaking out of turn, for Falwell preaches the same message in one form or another nearly every Sunday. This past summer, he told his congregation, “The war is not between fundamentalists and liberals but between those who love Jesus Christ and those who hate Him.” To Falwell, it is axiomatic that his kind of people are the only righteous ones and that they will therefore face nothing but hostility from the rest of the world. Even when he is speaking in sports metaphors, he will say, “Learn to pay the price. If you’re going to be a champion for Christ, learn to endure hardness. . . .You won’t always have the applause of men.” Then, dropping the sports metaphor, he will continue, “You will have Satan as your archenemy. The moment you entered the family of God, Satan declared war on you. The Christian life is to be a competitive, combative life. . .”

Though Falwell frequently makes allusions to sports, it is the military analogy that is central to his view of the church and its role in the world. “The local church is an organized army equipped for battle, ready to charge the enemy,” he has said. “The Sunday school is the attacking squad.” And, elsewhere, “The church should be a disciplined, charging army. . . . Christians, like slaves and soldiers, ask no questions.” Many evangelists see their enterprise as one of spreading the Good News and sharing the love of Christ with fellow human beings. But for Falwell evangelism is, quite simply, war. In one sermon on the role of the evangelist, he said, speaking of his own experience:

Radio became the artillery that broke up my fallow ground and set me to thinking and searching, but the local church became the occupation force that finished the job and completed the task the artillery had begun. It is important to bombard our territory, to move out near the coast and shell the enemy. It is important to send in the literature. It is important to send that radio broadcast and to use that dial-a-prayer telephone. It is important to have all those external forces being set loose on the enemy’s stronghold.

But ultimately some Marines have to march in, encounter the enemy face-to-face, and put the flag up, that is, build the local church. . . .I am speaking to Marines who have been called of God to move in past the shelling, the bombing and the foxholes and, with bayonet in hand, encounter the enemy face-to-face and one-on-one bring them tinder submission to the Gospel of Christ, move them into the household of God, put up the flag and call it secured. You and I are called to occupy until He comes.

Nowhere in this sermon does Falwell mention Satan. The enemy here is quite clearly human; it is quite clearly everyone who does not subscribe to his own particular brand of fundamentalism.

Like many military men, Falwell loves numbers. To journalists, he likes to quote dollar figures, listener statistics, and poll percentages—often with some exaggeration in his favor. To his congregation, he quotes the soul counts of his missionary legions on long-range patrols. “In London, two thousand souls were saved for Christ this week. In New York, Liberty Baptist students saved forty-two souls in a twenty-four-hour period.” Occasionally, Falwell paints his enterprise as old-fashioned territorial imperialism. Every pastor, he said in one sermon, has a divine mandate to “capture our Jerusalem for Christ,” then “capture our surrounding province, or state, our Judaea for Christ,” then “capture the adjacent nations, our Samarias,” and, finally, “touch the uttermost part of the earth and likewise capture it for Christ.” Usually, however, he makes a more modern analogy: America is “the only logical launching pad for world evangelization.”

In the context of Lynchburg, Virginia, Falwell’s military metaphors sound less remarkable than they might elsewhere, for Virginia has a strong military tradition, and over the years the counties around Lynchburg have sent more than their fair share of volunteers and recruits into the armed forces. In Falwell’s own congregation, military service is probably the rule rather than the exception. (At the start of one service, Falwell announced that someone in the congregation was looking for helmets, an M-l6, and other military gear “for photographic purposes.” A man in the balcony signalled that he could lend the equipment.) But to speak of a tradition is to raise a chicken-or-egg dilemma, for Falwell’s militarized theology is hardly original with him. His particular brand of fundamentalism has always proposed a Manichean universe and identified believers with soldiers, slaves, and early Christian martyrs. It is precisely the tradition of Flannery O’Connor’s Hazel Motes, who went off to war and who came back to martyr himself because he [would] not find anyone else to do it.

Of course, most Thomas Road people probably do not see themselves as bayonet-wielding Marines except at the moments when they are listening to such sermons. Still, there was something of that gung-ho spirit in the seventh-grade girls out on their evangelistic mission. And there is definitely some of it in the L.B.C. students training to be pastors and church workers. Those L.B.C. students refer to their college as “boot camp” and look upon their education as training in discipline and hardship. This past summer, fifty of them spent two and a half months in New York City working for the pastor of a fledgling Bible church in upper Manhattan and living in dormitories that were somewhat more crowded and somewhat less comfortable than the usual boot-camp barracks. The fifty—forty young men and ten young women—would get up at 6 A.M. every day to play two hours of team sports before breakfast; after breakfast, they would have a period of study and devotions; then, while the young women prepared meals or did secretarial tasks, the young men would walk the streets for five, six, or seven hours, going from door to door and proselytizing for the church. In their two and a half months, they went downtown only once, and then not to sightsee but to hold an evangelistic meeting in Times Square. One of the students told me he had seen the face of Satan in that Forty-second Street crowd—the Devil in this case having appeared in the guise of a punk rocker.

When I asked Thomas Road people what they most liked about Falwell, the reply was very often “He is such a loving man” or “He has such a big heart.” I found the reply puzzling. True, Falwell did not attack members of his own congregation, and a number of them told me of his acts of kindness and generosity to individuals. Still, I could not understand how they could ignore the hostility he so often gives vent to from the pulpit. Then it occurred to me that they had not ignored it. The Reverend Carl McIntire, a preacher of Falwell’s own brand of fundamentalism, has written, “Separation involves hard, gruelling controversy. It involves attacks, personal attacks, even violent attacks. . . . Satan preaches brotherly love in order to hold men in apostasy.” Thus, he concluded, aggression “is an expression of Christian love.”

When Falwell talks about himself as a young man, he paints a picture of the toughest kid on the block—football captain, gang fighter, and prankster, who would take the steering wheel off a car going sixty miles an hour. Such super-masculinity is a quality he attributes also to Christ. In one sermon last year, he denounced the tradition of portraying Christ as a thin man with long hair and flowing robes. “Christ wasn’t effeminate. . . . The man who lived on this earth was a man with muscles. . . . Christ was a he-man!” he concluded triumphantly, and loud “Amen”s went up from the congregation. The men in that congregation seemed to see love as emanating from strength—from dominion and power rather than from the Lamb. For them, Falwell’s aggressiveness might seem to be a promise of protection both from outside enemies and from the anarchic and rebellious spirit within. Rather than the shepherd, Falwell might be the ram guarding his flock. When he is not on the offensive, he takes a paternal tone. “The Love of a Big Man” is the title of a chapter in one of his self-promoting books. Like the younger television evangelist James Robison, he can put on a threatening display; but also—and better than most media-cool personalities—he can be the stern but genial and caring father.

In other words, Falwell secures his own authority by maintaining the tension between his congregation and the society at large. His Christians may be martyrs or conquering Marines, but they are always in danger. Often, he seems to go out of his way to fabricate enemies for the church. One Sunday, the enemy was a local reporter who identified Falwell as “right-wing.” “Isn’t that reporter on the other side if she calls us ‘right-wing’?” Falwell asked—though in one of his books he had identified himself as more right-wing than anybody else. Another day, he accused the “liberal media” of conspiring to raise the price of air time on Sunday mornings, although, as he well knew, the price rise was a result of inflation and of competition from television evangelists attempting to follow in his footsteps. Yet another day, the enemy was the people in City Hall who “discriminated against” the church by asking the “Gospel Hour” to pay real-estate taxes: “Somebody down there doesn’t like the message we preach.” In the next breath, he compared himself to an exiled Russian Baptist preacher who had spoken to his congregation two weeks before: “Did Georgi Vins stop preaching when they put him in prison?” Life “isn’t going to get easier for Christians,” he continued. “There will be ever-increasing pressures from the socialists and humanists.”

To what extent Falwell shares the sense of danger he creates is not certain. He often seems quite comfortable in the company of “liberals” and others he has proclaimed enemies of the church. In 1973, a Roanoke reporter covering the S.E.C. trial noticed that while the Thomas Road congregants who were packed into the courtroom regarded the S.E.C. lawyers with open hostility (or, in the case of a black lawyer, contempt), Falwell chatted with the lawyers between sessions, and even seemed to become friendly with them. In February of this year, he seemed absolutely at ease with Bob Guccione, the publisher of Penthouse, when both men appeared on Tom Snyder’s “Tomorrow” show. Yet I have seen him stiff with tension in the face of a single journalist. Then, too, he has a habit of talking about the prospect of his own violent death.

So, in spite of all the washer-dryers and the living-room suites, there is a kind of cultishness about Falwell’s congregation. To a stranger who shows a sympathetic interest, Thomas Road people can display great generosity and an almost painful openness. But when they are challenged the same people will shut the gates and look upon the outsider as the enemy—an enemy with whom they have no way to negotiate. To anyone who criticizes the church they will attribute the worst possible motives, at once dismissing the criticism and dehumanizing the critic. For questioning church policies, people in Lynchburg have received threats of “God’s vengeance.”

Some of the Thomas Road people I talked to—such as William Sheehan and Nancy James—had clearly waged impressive moral struggles for their own lives and those of the members of their families. One woman told me in touching detail about the breakup of her marriage, and her long and finally successful struggle to establish a new relationship with her husband and children. But for people outside the compass of the family and the church she—and others like her—seemed to have no moral imagination, and not even much sympathy. This terrifying hardness conceals an equally terrifying vulnerability, because as a result of their lack of sympathy these people know very little about the outside world.

People who have worked with Falwell’s organization give the impression that it is this innocence, this vulnerability, that, more than anything else, explains the disarray of Falwell’s finances. Most Thomas Road people have not been educated outside Bible colleges; they know little about finance or the law. And many of them have a “God will provide” attitude toward money. The few rich people among them are generally self-made men who have no patience with bureaucratic and lawyerly restrictions, and believe this large nonprofit institution can be run the way they run their own companies. They trust few people outside the church, so they seldom get good advice. And yet the cultishness within the organization prevents anyone from calling anyone else to account in a rational manner for bad decisions or bumbling. The we-they barrier could shield incompetents, and it could also shield crooks and con men, for those within the organization are easily manipulated by anyone who professes to be a “Christian” and a Falwell supporter. In the late seventies, a man named Frank William Menge appeared on the scene professing devotion to Falwell and offering him a number of harebrained schemes. Because he said he was a fundamentalist and because he was married to the daughter of a tycoon, Falwell put him on the board of “The Old-Time Gospel Hour” and did not discover for some time what seemed patent to outsiders—that the man was a swindler, and a rather poor one at that. This blind trust works both ways, and Thomas Road people—it need hardly be said—have never called Falwell to account for any of his decisions.

In a sense, it was only natural that Falwell and his people should go into politics. They had, after all, detailed and comprehensive views about the organization of society. And they had absolutely no doubt that their way was the correct one. Aggressive proselytizers, they had set themselves to convert everyone in the society—and therefore the society itself. Add to this missionary movement a man with leadership qualities and you have the elements of a powerful political organization. The question, then, might seem to be not why Falwell went into politics but what took him so long. The answer would seem to be the one that he gave in 1965: the doctrine of separation between the church and “the world.” The doctrine has a long history in American Protestantism—the longest, in fact, since it provided the motive for the Pilgrims’ voyage to the New World. But in the twentieth century it has been exclusively a fundamentalist doctrine, and one that even fundamentalists have often observed in the breach. At the time of the great theological controversies in the nineteen-twenties, fundamentalist theologians and evangelists preached not only against the social gospel but also against the Bolsheviks, the League of Nations, and the “garlic-eating immigrants.” Fundamentalist pastors across the country campaigned, along with many other Protestants, for Prohibition and for the defeat of Al Smith, the first Catholic to run for President. In the nineteen-fifties, there was another burst of fundamentalist activism. Among others, the radio evangelists Carl McIntire and Billy James Hargis used their pulpits for right-wing political crusades. Then, too, Billy Graham, the most popular evangelist of all, came out for Nixon in 1960, 1968, and 1972, and expressed himself freely on such subjects as defense appropriations, arms-control treaties, and the Vietnam War.

Among fundamentalists, it was really only the Southern pastors who observed the doctrine of separation with any consistency. Some of them were strict about it—to the point of forbidding their followers to associate with non-fundamentalists. Others preached that the church should not interfere in politics except on “moral issues,” such as the blue laws, the prohibition of alcohol, and the teaching of evolution in the schools. But then, even without a doctrine of separation, the pastors of most conservative Southern churches took the same position: that is, they rejected the social gospel.

The difference between Northern and Southern churches was not, by and large, doctrinal but rooted in history and in the different social and economic conditions of the two regions. In the case of certain fundamentalist churches, the withdrawal into personal piety seems to have been a reflection of the poverty and sense of despair in the South after the Civil War. The churches of the poor—particularly the Pentecostal and Holiness churches—rejected the material world altogether for spiritual discipline and chiliastic speculation. For the poor, these churches offered an internal migration from life as it was on earth. But not all the conservative churches were so withdrawn from worldly concerns. The Southern Baptist Convention, after all, split off from the Northern Baptist churches before the Civil War on the very material issue of slavery: the all-white denomination opposed church interference with it. Many church historians therefore maintain that the many white churches continued to reject “politics” after the Civil War because their congregations were more or less content with things as they were. Their withdrawal from all but “moral issues” was, one writer has said, an “existential amnesia”—a denial of responsibility for the past of slavery and for the present of racial injustice.

As a matter of theology, Falwell belongs to this Southern tradition of pietistic withdrawal. But as a matter of circumstance he and his people belong to the New South and its economic success story. Even in the early years, he never interpreted the doctrine of separation to mean withdrawal from commerce and industry. His sermons were often lessons in worldly success—how-to-do-it manuals in the mainstream tradition of Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale. Instead of urging retreat from the social order, he urged participation in it. His failure to criticize the social status quo—except on the “moral issues” of alcohol and others—thus had to be interpreted as support for it.

In the early years of his ministry, Falwell—like many people in Lynchburg, and like many white ministers across the South—was a segregationist. When several black high-school students conducted a kneel-in at the Thomas Road Church, in the early sixties, they were evicted by the police. He founded the Lynchburg Christian Academy as an all-white school for his all-white church. In his 1965 sermon “Ministers and Marchers,” he invoked the doctrine of separation in order to make a frontal attack on the civil-rights movement. Falwell began that sermon by questioning “the sincerity and nonviolent intentions of some civil-rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mr. James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left-wing associations.” He went on to say that the Communists were obviously exploiting this tense situation, and that the demonstrations and marches “have done more to damage race relations and to gender hate than to help!” Toward the end, he talked about the involvement of church leaders with “the alleged discrimination against Negroes in the South” and asked why they did not concern themselves instead with the problem of alcoholism, since “there are almost as many alcoholics as there are Negroes.”

Falwell now says he changed his mind about the role of preachers in politics because of such issues as abortion and school prayers. But it was the civil-rights movement that prompted that first political speech. In October of 1980, just before Reagan’s visit to Lynchburg, when he called that sermon “false prophecy,” he asserted that he and his fellow-ministers were now doing exactly what King and his fellows had done. His repudiation of the sermon makes it clear that his change of position was little more than a political change from support of the status quo to attack upon it. The civil-rights movement was the turning point. It showed Falwell that preachers could be politically effective and removed one important reason for his support of the status quo. Ironically, it may have benefitted Falwell and other white fundamentalists as much as or more than it benefitted the blacks in the South. If the fundamentalists had felt any guilt about the plight of their fellow human beings, the civil-rights movement relieved them of it. It gave them moral absolution, and it gave them the vote; it gave them their civil rights at no cost to themselves.

At no cost because the civil-rights movement actually changed very little at the Thomas Road Church. Falwell and his pastors have brought a few blacks into the church and into the Liberty Baptist Schools. But the congregation remains more than ninety per cent white, and with the unwritten law against interracial dating white parents can still see the school and the college as alternatives to the fully integrated public schools. The Thomas Road pastors say that they don’t make much of an attempt to evangelize the black population of Lynchburg. When I asked Falwell why they did not, he said that the black pastors would resent it—they would resent him for taking the “leading people” away from their churches. The Reverend Jim Moon gave a slightly different answer to the question: “I don’t think the white man will ever reach the black population. They don’t trust us and never will. We have to train black pastors to reach them. We are a white church and will always be that way.” Falwell does not any longer speak ill of civil-rights leaders. In a sermon shortly after his repudiation of “Ministers and Marches,” he described the efforts of Martin Luther King, Jr., as “noble.” He does not attack black politicians in Lynchburg. A year ago, he took M. W. Thornhill, Jr., the black city councilman, out to lunch and offered the equivalent of an apology for past actions. Falwell has, in other words, accommodated himself to the change of attitude in the country and in Lynchburg. Now, like many politicians, he refers to racial issues by other names. On television, he has pushed all the coded buttons: “welfare chisellers,” “urban rioters,” “crime in the streets.” On his return from a trip to southern Africa in 1979, he declared support for the Muzorewa government in what was then called Zimbabwe-Rhodesia and criticized those governments and organizations which were giving aid to the guerrilla forces and the black refugees. In his subsequent book, “Listen, America!,” he praised the apartheid regime in South Africa for its support of religious freedoms and attacked “Comrade Mugabe, the new Marxist dictator” by suggesting that he would suppress Christian freedoms in Zimbabwe.

Politically, Falwell clearly stands for a reaction against all the pressures for integration and social justice brought by the liberal coalition in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Then, many of his church members clearly do fear the consequences of integration, if it means that their children’s schools must include large numbers of poor black students. But on a personal level I found no sign of racial hostility in the Thomas Road congregation. At Liberty Baptist College, I saw a good deal of camaraderie between black and white male students, and nowhere did I hear a racial slur as such. What I did hear was anti-Semitism.

In a Bible-study class at Liberty Baptist summer school, a student answering a question about Biblical history said, “Well, if Jews are anything like they are today, they’re richer than anybody else, so . . .” and he went on with his answer. That the professor made no comment on the remark was surprising as well as shocking. Religious tolerance is, of course, not the forte of the Thomas Road Church. (The pastors use the word “Christian” to mean “fundamentalist,” as in this sentence pronounced by a college administrator: “We’re going to have a Christian football team equal to that of Notre Dame.”) Still, Falwell and his pastors seemed to have left behind some of the Know-Nothing attitudes of the Protestant countryside—their anti-Catholicism, at least, having been rendered down to the hone of doctrine on which Sunday-school students cut their theological teeth. For Fundamentalists, the Jews have been less theological enemies than precursors—Chosen of God, who in the end will return to Israel and be saved. Falwell has visited Israel, given money for the planting of a forest there, and shaken hands with Prime Minister Menachem Begin; and he has lunched with the leaders of the Jewish National Fund in New York City. He has made Israel one of his causes. “To stand against Israel is to stand against God,” he has said repeatedly, and, in more directly political vein, he has defended the Begin government’s settlement policy on the West Bank. He has invited Orthodox Jews to join the Moral Majority. Yet he has a Moral Majority director in New York State who recently said that Jews have “almost a supernatural ability to make money,” and claimed to number among his followers “a full-blooded Jewish man.” When a reporter asked Falwell about the remark concerning money, he said that he himself did not believe in stereotyping. But a few months before Falwell had said on the steps of the Virginia state capitol, “A few of you here today don’t like Jews. And I know why. He can make more money accidentally than you can on purpose.”

In Falwell’s congregation, the traditional anti-Semitism of those who have never consciously met a Jew in their lives seems to have met and matched up with a newer kind of reaction. The Dyba family, of Pearl River, New York, had recently moved to Lynchburg to join the Falwell congregation. Stanley Dyba, a retired officer in the New York City-prison system, complained for two solid hours about the deterioration of the suburban town they had lived in. With enthusiastic assistance from his wife and children, he described the increase in crime, the corruption of the school system, the drugs, the lack of patriotism and the lack of respect for authority, attributing all these things to the predominance of “one ethnic group.” This ethnic group turned out to be not the blacks (as I had anticipated) but the Jews. As he saw it, the liberal Jews—not the Orthodox Jews, he was careful to say—had destroyed the community by introducing disruptive notions of rights: children’s rights, teachers’ rights, prisoners’ rights, and so on.

Falwell identifies “the liberals” as both the political and the spiritual enemy. At various times, he has denounced all the rights movements of the sixties and seventies. During the 1980 Presidential campaign, he took to describing himself to the members of “the liberal press” as a conservative. In the past—the fairly recent past—that was not how he had sounded and not how he had described himself. In 1977, he called for a return to “the McCarthy era, where we register all Communists,” and added, “Not only should we register them but we should stamp it on their foreheads and send them back to Russia.” In “America Can Be Saved,” a book published in 1979, he wrote, “If you would like to know where I am politically, I am to the right of wherever you are. I thought Goldwater was too liberal!” Falwell’s political definition of a “liberal” would fit anyone to the left of Senator Jesse Helms; his theological definition would fit any Protestant who is not a fundamentalist. “The liberal churches are not only the enemy of God but the enemy of the nation,” Falwell has said. He would describe as “liberal” anyone who teaches evolution and anyone who does the foxtrot. (“I don’t know why every one of our Presidents thinks he has to wine and dine every drunk who comes over here from some other country and dance with his wife. It seems to me that if a President is a Christian, he can offer that foreign head of state some orange juice or tomato juice, have a good minister come in and read a few verses of scripture, and if he doesn’t like that, put him on the next plane back home!” Falwell said this during the Carter Administration.)

Under the circumstances, what is surprising is the cordiality that has always existed between Falwell and the conservative, largely Episcopalian business establishment of Lynchburg. To be sure, Falwell himself is a big business these days—someone to be reckoned with in Lynchburg—but this was not always the case. It was not the case in 1973, when the five Lynchburg business leaders volunteered to help save his church, and gave him several hours of their time every week for several years without recompense. These men still approve of Falwell, and they are not the only ones. In 1978, Thomas Glass, then the publisher of the city’s two newspapers, told a Roanoke reporter, “Lynchburg is a conservative community. People here appreciate the things Jerry stands for—God and country and the basic things in life.” An Episcopalian, Glass called Falwell “a wonderful man of God.”

Many Lynchburg businessmen who admire Falwell do not hear what he says when he addresses his own people. And when he talks to a group like the Rotary Club he will pick an issue, such as gay-rights legislation, that everyone can agree on. (He told the Lynchburg Rotary Club last spring that such legislation would force every business to hire a quota of homosexuals.) Still, those in the business community who have worked with Falwell have a fairly exact idea of where he stands; at least, they know enough to know that they do not go along with everything he does. They believe, for example, that it is tacky, at best, to raise money by offering American flags from the pulpit, as Falwell did last year. And they consider “the people around Jerry” a bit fanatical and very naïve. Some would, as one of them put it, “buy into school prayers,” but none of them would consider joining the Moral Majority, any more than they would consider joining the Thomas Road Church.

When these businessmen are asked what they like about Falwell, they tend to talk about the institutions he has built for his own people: the home for alcoholics, the summer camp for children, the school and the college, with their “surprisingly high academic levels.” One corporate vice-president said, “What impresses me is the behavior and appearance of the L.B.C. students. They look to me like the ideal American youth—though my wife doesn’t think so, and they make my kids sick.” In general, the wives and children of these men take a far more jaundiced view of Falwell and his students. But then the kids who are going to other colleges do not have the perspective their fathers achieve. “It’s a laboring church,” said one of the five businessmen who had been on the committee to straighten out the church’s finances—the president of the First Colony Life Insurance Company. “There’s no participation in it by community leaders, and that is probably why it is so successful. The nonachievers have to have something to be proud of, and they are proud of their church and contribute handsomely.” Even those establishment people who are close to Falwell tend to talk sociology, and even those who are not see the church as being good for others. Joan Jones, a member of the Virginia state legislature from Lynchburg, a Democrat, and an E.R.A. supporter, said, “These are disquieting times for the average person. To have someone like Jerry around, who is positive, who creates an identity for them, is very comforting. In this mobile society, there is a need for support. It’s very comforting to build one’s whole life around an institution like the Thomas Road Church.”

To listen to the people of the Lynchburg establishment talk is to wonder whether it is not, finally, they who are the real targets of Falwell’s wrath. “You can’t hate people you don’t know,” Tim Setliff says. Falwell does not know those people he so often singles out for attack—Jane Fonda, Gloria Steinem, Hugh Hefner—but he knows the business élite of Lynchburg and its privileged children, who go to ivy-covered colleges and learn to believe in women’s rights and environmentalism. And no country-club member is more conscious than he of the class divisions in the town. “Lynchburg used to be a cliquish place,” he told me. “But no longer.” In a sermon, he said that just after his conversion, in 1952, he drove around Lynchburg in his car, stopping by the wayside to pray. “I began praying for the Rivermont section, the élite section where our wealthy people live, because I knew that not one of them was hearing the Gospel.” After that, he prayed for the poorer sections of the city. The anti-Semitism of Falwell’s followers has very little to do with religion and a great deal to do with their feelings of resentment against the rich.

But Lynchburg establishment people tend to discount a good deal of Falwell’s rhetoric, for, with all his apparent aggressiveness, he has never challenged them directly. Instead, he has in many ways tried to identify himself and his church with the traditions of the Virginia aristocracy. In his political TV special “America . . . You’re Too Young to Die,” Falwell posed himself against a gentleman-farmer backdrop of rolling green fields, fine wooden fences, and a handsome old barn with a wooden cask in it. His L.B.C. publicity brochures often speak of “heritage.” There is some pathos in this, for Falwell apparently wanted a red brick campus at L.B.C. His present church is red brick, and, according to his brochures, was built from a design by Thomas Jefferson. In his sermons, Falwell often identifies the traditions of the Founding Fathers with those of his spiritual ancestors the Puritans—a confusion that Jefferson would have objected to most strenuously.

Falwell has attacked “the liberal churches,” but seldom any local church or local minister by name. He has never tried to upset the political consensus in the city—with the result that most establishment people think he couldn’t do it if he wanted to. He has also rarely attached any form of business enterprise in Lynchburg. In 1978, he, along with many other Protestant ministers, opposed the legalization of pari-mutuel betting in Virginia, and in 1979 he called for a boycott of Swedish goods, on the ground that the Swedish government was giving aid to guerrilla forces in Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. But he has never campaigned against discothèques, against the selling of wine and beer in the local supermarkets, against the showing of Hollywood films in the local theatres—or, indeed, against any form of business enterprise. In his various fund-raising letters, he has launched tirades against those who manufacture and profit from pornography, but he never once attacked the Lynchburg plant of Meredith/Burda, which, until two years ago, printed Penthouse magazine.

The businessmen who know Falwell say that all this can be explained by the fact that Jerry is really a live-and-let-live kind of guy. “You’d know he was no fanatic.” Those who have worked with him over long periods say that he has never tried to convert them. He would talk business, not theology, and he wouldn’t mind a fellow having a drink or a smoke in his presence. A lawyer who describes himself—accurately—as a “cigar-chewing Episcopalian with a mustache” remembers that once Jerry invited him to go ahead and have a drink when they were seated together in a restaurant. He refused, he said, because he did not want to risk any public embarrassment to Falwell. “You have to know Jerry. In person, he’s a wonderful guy, really.”

M. W. Thornhill, Jr., also thinks that Falwell can be charming. He was personally touched by Falwell’s gesture of reconciliation to him. “But look,” he said. “When he tries to get his people to vote for Reagan, I consider that he’s on my back and on the backs of all poor people in this city. And, let me tell you, many of his people are just as poor as we are.”

Falwell has always had an economic philosophy of rugged individualism and laissez-faire enterprise. In his view, “the free-enterprise system is clearly outlined in the Book of Proverbs.” He is anti-union and against almost all forms of government assistance to the poor. In “Listen, America!,” he produces flourishes of quotations from Milton Friedman and then denounces the food-stamp program and welfare for all but the sick, the aged, and the unemployed during a depression. His economic philosophy is not as sophisticated as that of the Lynchburg business establishment, but, over all, it coincides with the interests of the local business owners and managers far better than it does with those of most people in his own congregation—for his church is, as the insurance-company president pointed out, a laboring church. Not only that, but many people in his congregation depend on government assistance in one form or another. Some of them live in government-built housing; some of them live on food stamps; some use the health services that the city provides to those who cannot pay; a number—residents and transients alike—apply to the federally funded Lynchburg Community Action Group for emergency money to pay a month’s rent or to cover their transportation back home. What is more, L.B.C. as an institution depends on government assistance. Not only does it have a tax-exempt status—as does “The Old-Time Gospel Hour” federally—but it depends rather heavily on the city’s free health services. Many of the L.B.C. students are married and have children. According to a spokesman for the Lynchburg Health Department, so many of them bring their families in for free medical care that they strain the city’s capacity for looking after its own residents.

Falwell’s economics—like his flag-waving superpatriotism—derives from the fundamentalist program of the nineteen-twenties. It is no less—and no more—traditional. In the late nineteenth century, the rural “Bible-believing” Protestants had supported the free-silver campaign and the populist anti-big-business crusades of William Jennings Bryan. When the First World War broke out, they campaigned against American military preparedness, and until the United States entered the war they opposed American participation in it. By 1920, however, the populist movement was dead, Bryan himself had left politics, and the great theological controversies had arisen, pitting conservative scriptural literalists against modernists and advocates of the social gospel. The fundamentalists, as the former group then began to call itself, saw Christian civilization threatened by an array of frightening new forces: German rationalism, the social gospel, socialism, Bolshevism, Catholicism, sexual permissiveness, and Darwinism. While the theologians erected doctrinal walls against all these new tendencies, the evangelists thundered out against the “Reds” in this country, the liberal immigration laws, the Catholics, the Jews, the “garlic-eating immigrants,” and the teaching of evolution in the schools. Rural populism did not, it appeared, translate into a labor populism, and the evangelists in the newly industrialized cities made common cause with business against the labor unions. Billy Sunday told his audiences of Protestant workers—newly arrived from the countryside—to work hard, live clean, and pray to Jesus for the life to come. “We’ve had enough of this godless social-service nonsense,” he said to a reporter in 1915. A number of his revival campaigns—including a draft-registration campaign in 1917 and a subsequent crusade among striking West Virginia coal miners—were paid for by industrial magnates like John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Out of this alliance between big business and the nativist Protestants came the Prohibition amendment and Republican Administrations that curbed the labor unions and gave free rein to big business.

When members of the press have asked Falwell what made him change his mind about the role of preachers in politics, he has usually responded by listing four or five events. Last June, his list consisted of the Supreme Court decision on abortion, the “pornography explosion,” the federal government’s attempt to interfere with “Christian” schools, and the F.C.C.’s application of the “fairness doctrine” to remarks about homosexuals. This January, the list included the 1962 Supreme Court decision on school prayers but not the fairness doctrine. Last June, he said that the abortion decision of 1973 was a turning point for him, but this January he said that evangelicals (among whom he included himself) had not paid much attention to the abortion issue until three to five years ago. Just when Falwell changed his mind and just which issues weighed most heavily with him are not at all clear.

Falwell did not announce his decision to go into politics until 1979, but he had begun to move in the direction of the political arena some years earlier. According to former associates, the impetus came from the demands of his television ministry; his trips around the country seemed to convince him that he could reach a far wider audience by talking about “family” issues than by talking theology. In any case, around the mid-seventies the emphasis of his preaching changed; instead of attacking other religious creeds and the evils of drink, he now attacked pornography, homosexuality, abortion, and the E.R.A. In the Bicentennial year of 1976, he began a series of I Love America rallies—elaborate, choreographed affairs with singers and choruses—on the steps of state capitols around the country. During the Presidential campaign, he attacked Jimmy Carter—the one evangelical candidate—for giving an interview to Playboy, and declared that “as a private citizen” he would vote for President Ford. In 1977, he associated himself with the campaigns led by Anita Bryant and Phyllis Schlafly, and a year later he launched a Clean Up America campaign. The campaign was designed as another fund-raising mechanism for “The Old-Time Gospel Hour,” but along with the fund-raising letters he included ballots posing questions like “Do you approve of known practicing homosexuals teaching in public schools?” and promised to send the answers on to the President and to Congress. He put out booklets containing advice on how to form organizations to put pressure on local politicians, and that year he himself campaigned around the country. At the end of 1978, he claimed credit for the defeat of a gay-rights ordinance and a state version of the E.R.A. in Florida and the defeat of the proposal to legalize pari-mutuel betting in Virginia.

In 1979, Falwell resumed his I Love America rallies. According to one associate, these rallies and a new fund-raiser, the I Love America Club, had their origins in his desire to do something with Bicentennial Bibles he had left over after 1976. Be that as it may, the rallies plunged him into politics. In each state, he would invite local politicians to join him in speaking before an audience of pastors and their congregations. A politician—for instance, Senator Paul Laxalt, of Nevada; Governor John Dalton, of Virginia; Governor James Rhodes, of Ohio; or former Governor Julian Caroll, of Kentucky—would appear and talk about school prayers or national defense and affirm what a great American Jerry Falwell was, and Falwell would reciprocate by affirming the politician’s morality. In North Carolina, he held Senator Jesse Helms up as an exemplary politician, and told his audience to support such “Christian gentlemen” as I. Beverly Lake, the Republican candidate for governor that year. Up to that point, Falwell had claimed to be involved in a purely moral campaign on the moral issues. It was not until the formation of the Moral Majority, in the summer of 1979, that he admitted to political involvement—the distinction between moral and political clearly having something to do with tax status.

It was during this period, when Falwell was moving into politics step by step, that he came into contact with the Washington-based group of professional political organizers and lay activists for conservative causes: Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail expert, who had raised money for a number of right-wing candidates, including George Wallace; Howard Phillips, who had been brought into the Nixon Administration to dismantle the Office of Economic Opportunity; Paul Weyrich, a former journalist who had worked as an aide to two Republican senators; Robert Billings, the former president of Hyles-Anderson College, in Crown Point, Indiana, and president of the National Christian Action Coalition, which was leading a campaign to keep the I.R.S. from taxing “Christian” schools; and Ed McAteer, a former salesman and the field director for the Christian Freedom Foundation. During the years of the Carter Administration, these men had set up a network of think tanks, education lobbies, and political-action groups, including the Heritage Foundation, Phillips’ Conservative Caucus, Weyrich’s Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, and Billings’ National Christian Action Coalition. In preparation for the next election, they met not only with Falwell but also with James Robison, Pat Robertson, and a number of other evangelists. Out of their discussions came three new organizations: the Religious Roundtable, directed by McAteer, with James Robison as its vice-president; the Christian Voice, headed by the Reverend Robert Grant, with its political-action committee directed by Gary Jarmin (a former legislative director of the American Conservative Union); and the Moral Majority, whose first executive director was Billings. (He left in mid-1980 to work as Reagan’s religious liaison.)

Falwell’s staff members have maintained that Falwell alone conceived and created the Moral Majority. But that organization clearly shows the influence of Weyrich and others in the so-called Kingston Group. It was, for example, Weyrich’s idea that if the blue-collar Catholics were mobilized around abortion and other social issues they could be “the Achilles heel of the liberal Democrats.” The Moral Majority was set up as an ecumenical organization for conservative Catholics, Mormons, and Orthodox Jews as well as Protestants (“reverse ecumenism,” Weyrich called it)—though Falwell never had much success in organizing the clergy from these other faiths. During the 1980 campaign, he stressed abortion above other issues. Then, too, the Moral Majority was set up in a sophisticated fashion as three organizations: the Moral Majority, Inc., a legislative lobby; the Moral Majority Foundation, an educational group; and the Moral Majority political-action committee. Falwell ended by using only the Moral Majority, Inc., during the Presidential campaign, and created a series of state organizations headed by pastors which were neither controlled nor financed by the national organization. It was these pastors who on a local level organized campaigns and individually endorsed candidates. Falwell supported Ronald Reagan “only as a private citizen”—and this rather late in the day. Like Richard Viguerie, he initially supported John Connally, and switched his allegiance when Connally began to lose and Reagan to win in the primaries.

By the summer of 1980, the activities of the Moral Majority and similar groups had brought forth a chorus of protest from main-line clergymen, liberal politicians, and commentators. Many of these critics, objecting strenuously to the issuing of moral report cards on congressmen and the endorsement of candidates from the pulpit, claimed that Falwell was violating the principle of separation of church and state. Falwell, however, argued that the pastors were acting well within their rights: They were not breaking any law (their lawyers had informed them that only if the churches as institutions lobbied or endorsed candidates would their tax status be endangered). And by endorsing candidates on matters of principle they were only doing what the liberal clergy had done in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Falwell was right on these points, but the issue had another dimension as well—one never fully explored by his critics.

The doctrine of separation between the church and the world had been erected by the Puritans in Europe as a means of protecting the church from the state, and not vice versa. In the New World, however, the Puritans had arrogated the right to impose their moral code upon society by enshrining it in the law. Their descendants, both liberal and conservative Protestants, had continued to claim that right as a voting majority in spite of the Enlightenment tradition of the Founding Fathers and in spite of the increasing religious diversity of American society. In this century, they had voted in Prohibition and had had the words “under God” inserted in the Pledge of Allegiance. As the twentieth century progressed, the courts and the legislatures overturned a number of religiously based laws, beginning with Prohibition, and then, in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, mandatory school prayers, laws against abortion, anti-sodomy laws, and laws against cohabitation. They had apparently redefined the boundaries between the public and the private spheres, asserting in these matters the individual’s right to freedom of choice and conscience. The Moral Majority and other groups, such as the Right-to-Life movement, were now insisting that the state should claim competence in these “moral issues” and relinquish its competence in the areas of aid to the poor, affirmative action, and other issues—issues that the liberal clergy, among others, saw as based upon moral principles. (On the Phil Donahue show a few weeks ago, Falwell said it was the churches that should feed the poor, and not the state, with its food-stamp program.) The line along which the church should separate itself from the state was thus not at all clear; nor was the place where one man’s religion should not interfere with another’s. It was Falwell’s contention that separation between church and state did not mean separation of God and government.

When talking to fundamentalist audiences during the campaign, Falwell and the other politically active pastors justified their political activity—their abandonment of the separationist doctrine—in this fashion: The nation is now in the most serious crisis in its history. Pornography, abortion, divorce, militant homosexuality, drugs, crime, and atheistic humanism are corrupting the moral fibre of the country and destroying its will to resist Communism. America, like the Roman Empire, is on the decline. This decline began long ago (the thirties is the period that Falwell looks back to with nostalgia), but the real plunge came in the last decade. Christians must act now, for civilization itself is at stake. America is the last launching pad for world evangelism, and if it falls to Communism—as a result of its own moral decay—that will mean the end of Christianity.

To the non-fundamentalist ear, the explanation must suggest rhetorical inflation and casuistry; and yet perhaps it is a more exact account of fundamentalist political thinking than the list of single-issue grievances that Falwell so often gives the press. The picketing of the schools of Kanawha County was, after all, not a single-issue protest but a reaction to the changes that had taken place in American society over fifteen years. What is more, all the great outbreaks of fundamentalist fervor in the past have been motivated by a similar sense of crisis and cultural breakdown. According to Sidney Ahlstrom, author of “The Religious History of the American People,” many church historians place the beginning of the fundamentalist movement with a group of evangelical ministers from several denominations, primarily Presbyterian and Baptist, who after 1876 organized annual meetings for Bible study in the conviction that the United States—indeed, the whole Christian world—was “sinking so deeply and so decisively into apostasy and heresy that it could only mean the approach of the Last Days.” The movement did not coalesce until the nineteen-twenties, but when it did those conservative evangelicals who called themselves fundamentalists shared a belief that the world was in crisis—a fear that as a result of modern thinking in all its forms the collapse of Christian civilization was imminent. A minority entertained theories that this collapse would come as a result of Zionist, Bolshevik, or Catholic conspiracies. Of course, most fundamentalists cannot concentrate on global concerns any better than anyone else, with the result that much of the time they are, like the rest of us, preoccupied with the problems of everyday life. But fundamentalists who have addressed the state of the world have always done so in apocalyptic terms. If America was not Israel—the City on the Hill—then it must be Babylon. In the nineteen-fifties, Carl Mclntire and Billy James Hargis were preaching the imminent coming of Satan in the shape of a worldwide Communist conspiracy that would end civilization by destroying the American family. True, these were the radicals—what one writer has called the “ultrafundamentalists.” But the moderates had their own sense of crisis. Billy Graham, for example, preached quite regularly between 1950 and 1970 that the nation was in its worst state of spiritual decline. And quite regularly during that period he preached that the world would end soon.

This sense of crisis is quite natural, given the doctrine of premillennialism—the scenario that many fundamentalists have for the end of the world. In rough outline, the scenario, drawn mainly from the books of Daniel and Revelation, goes this way: At a time of confusion in the world, a false prophet, the Antichrist, will appear and will be supported by the apostate churches; simultaneously, the Beast will appear, in the form of a powerful political leader—a leader who will build a new Roman Empire and for a while bring peace to the world. The Jews will return to Israel, and some will be converted. Then the Beast and the Antichrist will together unleash the upheavals of the final three and a half years, or “great tribulation,” in which the Jews will once again suffer persecution. Finally, Christ will come with an army of saints to defeat the combined forces of the Beast and the Antichrist and to install the millennial reign of peace and justice on earth. The tribulation period will last for seven years, and only the true Christians—the “saved”—will not have to suffer them, for at the outset they will be pulled up from the earth in “the secret rapture” and will “meet Christ in the air.”

Since the Second Coming succeeds the tribulation, fundamentalists have always devoutly hoped for the onset of this period, unpleasant though it will be for everyone else on earth. And since they regard the Biblical prophecies as the literal truth, they have always looked to current events for signs of the beginning of this drama and for characters to cast in it. Since 1917, many have been convinced that the Beast will arise in Russia; the Bolshevik Revolution confirmed for them an earlier prophecy that Russia would play a major role in the tribulation. And since 1917 many have been certain that America would supply the armies of the saints. The creation of the state of Israel in 1948 fitted in perfectly with the prophecy of the return of the Jews to Palestine; many fundamentalists have been certain ever since that the tribulation will begin with a Russian attack on Israel.

The literalness of this interpretation of the Bible—born as it is of hope—has brought fundamentalists, in contrary fashion, to a rather mystical view of current events. For the interpretation can work both ways at once. If the Beast is incarnate in the Russian Communist leadership, then that leadership may well have Satanic powers not limited by the ordinary laws of nature. It may have not only the Satanic will but also the ability to destroy the American home. Conversely, the divorce rate may have a direct effect on America’s ability to resist Communism. Foreign policy will not stay foreign, or domestic affairs domestic, for there is a mystical unity to the world. Fundamentalists, however, differ in the kind of connections they make. In the nineteen-fifties, a small minority saw the introduction of fluorides into the water system as yet another form of subversion. Yet also in the fifties Billy Graham said, “My own theory about Communism is that it is masterminded by Satan. I think there is no other explanation for the tremendous gains of Communism in which they seem to outwit us at every turn, unless they have supernatural power and wisdom and intelligence given them.”

Fundamentalists, whatever their level of sophistication or of mystical abstraction, have always seen danger ahead for the Christian world. This is as true today as it was in the eighteen-nineties. What has changed is their perception of the most imminent or serious threats to that world. In the eighteen-nineties, they were concerned mainly with theological issues; they were fighting apostasy and heresy in the form of the new Biblical scholarship. In the nineteen-twenties, they worried about everything from German rationalism to social dancing with the emphasis differing between theologians and country pastors. In the nineteen-fifties, fundamentalist spokesmen seemed to be preoccupied with Communism: it was Communism that was responsible for all other evils; its influence was seen in the liberal churches and in all the newfangled liberal doctrines, such as permissive child rearing, that were corrupting American society. By the nineteen-seventies, however, fundamentalist preachers from Billy James Hargis to James Robison and Jerry Falwell had reversed this causal sequence: the feminists, the pornographers, and the militant homosexuals were destroying the American family, and its destruction would (in Confucian sequence) lead to the destruction of the nation by Communist armies.

Those fundamentalist ministers who have involved themselves in New Right politics tend to be moderators in the fundamentalist scheme of things; that is, they make distinctions between human and ecclesiastical history. Tim LaHaye, who is one of the theoreticians of the movement, and is a friend of Falwell’s, has written that the reign of the liberal humanists in America is a pretribulation tribulation; it is not predestined, and therefore it is subject to reversal. When Falwell and LaHaye talk about pornography, F.C.C. rulings, or I.R.S. regulations, they are talking about politics, this world and not another one. On foreign-policy issues, however, they seem to lose their grip on the mundane and go into an uneasy existential wobble.

Last summer, Falwell broadcast a series of six sermons on prophecy to his television congregation. In one of them, he described the tribulation and the Battle of Armageddon in some detail. The tribulation, he said, is possibly already upon us, for the world is, as has been prophesied, chaotic and leaderless. Russia will soon attack Israel, but it will eventually be defeated, and then the Antichrist will move into the Middle East and unleash the great tribulation, which will culminate in the Battle of Armageddon on a field two hundred miles long and a hundred miles wide, with Jerusalem at its center. (Here Falwell showed the television audience pictures of himself in Israel inspecting the proposed battlefield.) The four hundred million who it is prophesied will die there will surely include large numbers of Red Chinese.

During this broadcast, Falwell advertised a new booklet of his called “Armageddon: The Coming War with Russia,” pitching it as upbeat. “I believe that America can win that war,” he said. Earlier that summer, however, his optimism on that score seemed to be severely qualified. In an interview then, he told me that American military power was inadequate even to defend the country. “The Russians could walk right in and take over without firing a shot,” he said. “They could do that any time between now and the mid-eighties—and long after that if we continue with the Carter Administration’s non-defense policy. In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, we had military superiority over the Russians, and that’s what we need again. Not military equality but military superiority.” When he was asked how the Russians would “walk in,” he answered, “Across the Mexican border.” He then said that his information came from “leaders of the defense industry” and military men such as retired Admiral Thomas R. Moorer, retired Lieutenant-General Daniel Graham, and former Navy Secretary J. William Middendorf.

The coupling of Russia with Biblical prophecy poses problems that even the most experienced military men might not feel competent to deal with. The identification of the United States with Christian civilization poses problems of another sort. This year, Billy Graham said that he had changed his mind about a lot of things since the nineteen-fifties. “It was a mistake to identify the Kingdom of God with the American way of life,” he said. “I’ve come to see that other cultures have their own way that may be of just as great a value.” (Graham’s change of heart apparently came during one of the many crusades he has led in other countries since the fall of Richard Nixon.) Falwell persists in that identification, and he has run up against one of the many difficulties involved with it.

In August of 1980, Falwell told the Washington Post, “I am not one of those who use the phrase ‘Christianizing America.’ ” He had not used that phrase, but just a year before the same paper had quoted him as saying that he wanted to “turn this into a Christian nation.” Since then, he had learned better than to equate “Christian” with “moral”: the Moral Majority was, after all, an organization for Christians and Jews. His position now was that he was an advocate of separation theologically but was ecumenical in matters of politics. This he explained to the press and to his hard-line separatist critics, such as Bob Jones, Jr. He could see nothing wrong with this position, even after all the furor over the remark made by the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, the Reverend Bailey Smith: “God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew.” It was thus that on the eve of Ronald Reagan’s visit to Lynchburg in October of 1980 Falwell said, in answer to a question from the press, “I believe that God answers the prayer of any redeemed Jew or Gentile, and I do not believe that God answers the prayer of any unredeemed Gentile or Jew.” He explained that it was a fundamental tenet of his faith that man comes to God only through Christ, but that this was merely a theological argument he had with his rabbi friends, and that it implied no anti-Semitism. A few days after Reagan’s visit, however, Falwell met with Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum, of the American Jewish Committee, and later said, in a statement issued by Tanenbaum, “It grieves me that I have been quoted as saying that God does not hear the prayer of a Jew. . . .God is a respecter of all persons. He loves everyone alike. He hears the heart cry of any sincere person who calls on Him.” The price of ecumenical politics was apparently the renunciation of a fundamental tenet of faith. Alternatively, it was the maintenance of two separate audiences. While Falwell was talking with Rabbi Tanenbaum, he was—through “The Old-Time Gospel Hour”—running ads in magazines around the country asking “Christians everywhere” to sign his “Christian Bill of Rights,” so that he could present it with their signatures to the next President of the United States.

Haywood Robinson, the head of the federally funded antipoverty program in Lynchburg and the pastor of a church that had been deeply involved in the civil-rights movement, posed the problem of political involvement for preachers in this way: “I believe most profoundly that churches should concern themselves with the affairs of this world—and therefore with politics. But there is a thin line separating the legitimate, gospel-mandated expression of Christian responsibility to promote the Kingdom of God on earth and knee-deep involvement in the political process. It is important to uphold principles, such as human dignity, but once you start endorsing candidates right and left and addressing questions like how many tanks we should have, you cross that line. Instead of a monitor of the political process, you become a participant sharing the goals of politicians. The principles become lost, and the political rewards become self-justifying.”

For Robinson, as for most clergymen, the issue of the clergy’s role in politics raises only a tactical question: How deeply can they become involved while remaining true to their principles? For fundamentalists, however, it raises another sort of difficulty, since in fundamentalist theology there are no general principles but only scriptural dicta on discrete issues. These dicta cannot be compromised, nor can anything be added to them, for they are literally the Word of God. Fundamentalists, therefore, have a hard theological row to hoe when they attempt to deal with a pluralistic society and the art of the possible.

In October of 1980, Moral Majority staff members were describing Falwell as a conservative and pointing to recent interviews with him to demonstrate how moderate his approach really was. Those interviews indeed suggested that he had moderated his views on a number of subjects in the course of the campaign. Falwell had always denounced drinking, but in October, the week that Ronald Reagan came to Lynchburg, he denounced “excessive” drinking. Earlier, he had told the Washington Post, “I have no objection to a homosexual teaching in the public classroom as long as that homosexual is not flaunting his life style or soliciting students.” And he added that heterosexual teachers should act with the same propriety. This statement was rather different from one that was going out with his fund-raising letters for the Moral Majority: “Is our grand old flag going down the drain?... Just look at what’s happening here in America: Known, practicing homosexual teachers have invaded the classrooms.”

What had happened over the summer was that Falwell had developed an entirely different public from the one he was used to. News magazines and newspapers around the country gave him extensive coverage, and the major television interviewers asked him to be on their shows. Having sought this audience, he found a new set of interlocutors, and he learned a good deal from them. That, at least, was the opinion of Rabbi Tanenbaum, who said after his meeting with Falwell, “I gathered that this was the first time he’d had that kind of [theological] discussion with a rabbi. He appeared to agree with almost everything we talked about.” In his Washington Post interview, Falwell had said, “It looks like we’re coming on like religious crusaders of the Dark Ages, rule or ruin. That is the last thing the people I work with have on their minds, but we’ve got to prove that by action. . . . I think we have a P. R. job on our hands to prove that we are human beings who love people but who have convictions about what is right and wrong.” This was said less than a year after Falwell had remarked, “We are fighting a holy war.”

The difficulty was that this new audience would not go away when he talked to his old audience in the old tone of voice. Last summer, at a rally in the Shriners’ temple in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, he presented a slide show that featured, according to the New York Times, “repeated images of Charles Manson, Times Square sex-film marquees, atom bombs exploding, young men with their arms around each other, and unbreathing fetuses lying in bloody, white ceramic hospital pans,” and a quote attributed to the head of the American Communist Party: “I dream of the hour when the last Congressman is strangled to death on the guts of the last preacher.” And in an introduction to a book by Richard Viguerie Falwell talked about “the godless minority of treacherous individuals who have been permitted to formulate national policy.” Earlier in the year, he told an audience in Alaska that he had challenged President Carter about the homosexuals on his staff and that the President had replied that his staff had to represent the American people. When the White House produced a transcript of Falwell’s own tape proving that no such exchange had taken place, Falwell had to explain that he had not meant the story to be taken literally.

The period of the campaign was a difficult time for Falwell, because there were so many conflicting demands on him. His own people were asking for the old truths and the old ferocities; the Republican politicians were asking him to look like a tolerant, conservative sort of fellow; and the press was asking him to be consistent and accusing him of breaking the Commandment against bearing false witness when he was not consistent. Then, too, the contributions to “The Old-Time Gospel Hour” seemed to be declining. In October, he preached a sermon on a text from Matthew 26, “And Jesus went a little further,” comparing himself to Jesus, who “always went a little further.” The moral of his sermon was that all Christians had to show the courage and dedication of Jesus in doing more than it seemed safe to do. But, that being the moral, it was an odd text to take, since in that verse Jesus goes on further ahead of his disciples—to pray, “If it be possible, let this cup pass from me.” By the end of the campaign, Falwell seemed really frightened by the criticism. One Sunday, he brought a full box of press clippings to the rostrum and complained bitterly about the lies and the calumnies of the reporters. In a fund-raising letter dated October 10th, he wrote:

I have become the victim of a vicious, orchestrated attack by the liberal politicians, bureaucrats, and amoralists. . . .

The liberals and amoral secular humanists have tried to destroy my character and my integrity.

And sadly enough, some of my friends who once supported the Old-Time Gospel Hour have believed some of these false reports and charges made in the Press. . . .

I have burned the bridge behind me. You will never read it in the newspaper that Jerry Falwell quit. You may read that someone killed me—but that is the only way I can be stopped. . . .Opposition is becoming more and more violent. Our enemies are hitting us from every side.

And we are certain that right now there are key individuals in our country who are plotting to close down this ministry.

There was one familiar note in the letter:

In fact, if I am not able to raise 5 million dollars within the next thirty days. . . . I may be forced to begin taking the Old-Time Gospel Hour off the air, city by city.

But this was the first time that Falwell had requested funds for his religious program on the ground of his political martyrdom.

The election results cheered Falwell up a good deal. “It was my finest hour,” he said apropos of President Carter’s early concession speech to Reagan. On behalf of the Moral Majority, he took credit for a number of Republican victories across the country, and he delightedly told his congregation about all the “important people” who had been calling to congratulate him. He became conciliatory toward the press, telling his congregation that he was slowly winning over “hostile” reporters through Christian love, and that it was good for reporters to come to the Thomas Road Church, since they would hear the gospel “for the first time in their lives.”

The Republican victories, however, presented Falwell with a continuation of the dilemma he had faced during the campaign. The road in front of him forked. In one direction lay the rugged narrow valleys of the old-time religion, with its absolute truths, its puritanism, and its ferocities, where he could be the King of the Outsiders. In the other lay the broad plains where the majority of Americans lived, with all their liberal uncertainties, and where he might have some influence if he joined the general, confusing din. That he would have such a choice had perhaps not occurred to him, for his own people—his own congregation in Lynchburg—had never confronted him with such a clear division of the ways. They, too, thought that there was a compromise—or they wanted it both ways. They had left the coal-mining valleys of Appalachia and come into the city to work for Babcock & Wilcox or the Dairy Queen. They would not for anything give up their cars or their television sets; they liked their freedom; but much of what they saw in this new world either scared or offended them. With this ambivalence, they looked to Falwell for all the old certainties done up in glossy packages. They looked to church for a haven of security—but a haven with windows on the wide world. They sent their children to L.B.C. to train as Marines for Christ—and to get a degree that would be useful in civilian life. Some of them were far more hard-core, hard-shell Baptists than others, but the differences among them merely paralleled the divisions in the minds of most of them. The ambivalence of the congregation also paralleled the ambivalence in Falwell’s own personality: at times he could be a genial, tolerant, easygoing sort of fellow, and at other times he could be as rough as any boot-camp sergeant. On his own home ground, he had no need to choose, for both sides had proved useful, and, indeed, without both of them he could not have done what he had.

Now, however, there was a parting of the ways. The issue was posed most concretely when, less than a month after the Inauguration, a coalition of fundamentalist groups in California announced that it would spend three million dollars on a media campaign against homosexuals, and a spokesman for one of the groups, the Santa Clara chapter of the Moral Majority, said, “I agree with capital punishment, and I believe homosexuality is one of those that could be coupled with murder and other sins.” The Moral Majority spokesman in Lynchburg denied any knowledge of this but said that Falwell was against protecting homosexuals as a minority group through gay-rights legislation.

In the long term, Falwell could become a tolerant, conservative kind of preacher with influence in Washington. Billy Graham’s career pointed the way. It also provided a warning. Graham had wound himself so tightly around Nixon that he came to seem responsible for the man and all the expletives deleted. The Moral Majority had backed so many candidates in 1980 that there was at least a statistical risk that one of them would be caught with a hand in the till or, alternatively, would take to drink or to liberalism.

Figuratively speaking, the choice for Falwell lay between the genial Republican businessmen and his “disciplined, charging army.” That army was his strength, but it was also his weakness, since not even his own pastors in Lynchburg understood the big, polyglot world. They had not been trained for it, and if Falwell tried to explain it to them he would risk having them charge off under the command of some other general. He might succeed in bringing them along with him, of course, but then they would no longer be very good Marines. They would no longer be people like Mark Totten and Lester Bledsoe.

Mark Totten, Lester Bledsoe, and I walked for three and a half hours one afternoon last July on blistering New York City pavements. We walked south from the Manhattan Bible Church, in Inwood, to the mixed Jewish and Hispanic neighborhood of Washington Heights. “This is the Jew-Jewish-section of town,” Lester said. And then, with amazement, “You know, there are no Jews or Catholics in my town at all, and now I’m working only with Jews and Catholics.”

Lester, a slow-talking, rangy young man from a tiny town in southwestern Virginia, had gone to L.B.C. directly from high school. Mark, who came from West Virginia, had, like Falwell, studied engineering before deciding to become a pastor. They wore white short-sleeved shirts and pressed pants when they went on their rounds. They had been in New York almost a month with the L.B.C. contingent, and now they were trying to make a second contact with the people they had “witnessed to” before; they were also handing out leaflets titled “Let’s Get the Worm Out of the Big Apple!” The Jewish community of Washington Heights puzzled them. “There’s no drug problem here,” Mark said. “The kids are taking all kinds of drugs in my home town.” The students had been prepared for Sin City and for people with a desperate desire to reform. The Jews seemed—well, unavailable. A month before, Lester and Mark had attracted the attention of a crowd of kids in a park playground with their Bible reading. But then a group of parents saw them as Moonies and accused them of trying to kidnap their kids, and the school principal had the police evict them from the park. Then, said Mark, amazed, all the children in the neighborhood went away to camp. Mark and Lester had tried to ring doorbells and talk to the adults, but the apartment buildings all had security systems, and it had proved very difficult to witness to people through intercoms. The people they met on the streets told them they were happy to see nice clean boys like them helping out the Christian churches. Mark and Lester had no follow-up addresses in the Jewish part of the neighborhood. “Well, I’ll say this for them,” Mark said. “They keep their streets clean.”

We walked on into the Hispanic area of Washington Heights. Here Lester had some addresses, but half of them turned out to refer to nonexistent buildings. We walked on and on, Lester occasionally passing out a leaflet and saying in a commanding voice, “You be sure to read it, now.” Three of the addresses were right, but there was no one home in the first apartment and only small children in the second one, which we climbed five flights to get to. In the third apartment, a girl of fifteen or sixteen in shorts rolled well up on her plump thighs welcomed us to a blast of rock and roll. Lester lectured her about missing the Wednesday-night youth meeting. She thanked him gaily for coming around and said maybe she would come next Wednesday and bring her girl friends. As we left the building, I asked Mark whether they had told her that the church did not permit dancing. Mark answered judiciously to the effect that everything comes in its time.

We walked on. At the ramp to the George Washington Bridge, where their territory ended, we paused to look at the vast cityscape of lower Manhattan. Mark said that he was thinking of coming back to New York to work as a pastor. “Just look out there,” he said. “One and a half million people in twenty-two square miles. Why, there aren’t five thousand people in the twelve miles between my home town and the next one. Think of all the souls to be saved.” He also said that he would like to visit the Union Theological Seminary, since he’d heard that it was full of Communists and liberals. We walked back the way we had come. In the middle of one block, Lester stooped down and reached for something on the ground. He came up with a baby sparrow—he had somehow seen the tiny gray thing fluttering on a gray grating. Cradling the sparrow in his large hands, he gently moved it to a bush near the entranceway to an apartment building.

At the edge of Fort Tryon Park, we had our longest conversation of the day—with a man called Jack, who lived in the park. Jack was quite drunk—not an unusual condition for him—but very clean, since he had just finished washing himself and his clothes in water streaming out of a nearby hydrant. Lester and Mark knew a lot about Jack; they had talked to him many times before, witnessing to him and trying to persuade him to come to the Manhattan Bible Church. They had been unsuccessful. Jack said he had done many years in prison but many more in college and graduate school. At one point, he had had a wife and a house in the suburbs; now he was, he said, engaged in his own metaphysical exercise of living in the open on what he could cadge from people in passing cars. (Never, never, he said, from the walkers, since that wasn’t fair to the neighborhood.) When Mark began to lecture him on scriptural inerrancy, Jack interrupted to give a long, rambling discourse on early church history, the Greek philosophical tradition versus the Hebrew, and the problems often faced by Protestant theologians. He had flashes of great coherence, and he quoted—if I understood him correctly—Aristotle, St. Augustine, and Karl Barth.

“Jack is very arrogant about his education,” Mark said.

“These are nice kids,” Jack said. “But they don’t know anything. They don’t know church history, and they have no philosophical grounding. I could become a Catholic, but not this.” Waving his beer can, Jack went off into another ramble about the early church. Mark and Lester listened patiently, and when he had finished Mark recommenced his own monologue, about the Bible and the path it showed to salvation. Jack was clearly glad to have someone to talk to, but whether Mark and Lester stayed there out of interest or out of sheer doggedness I could not tell. And I could not ask them, for the word “interest” does not figure in their vocabulary.

After more than half an hour of this inconsequence, I said that I had to go. We walked back to Manhattan Bible Church through the sweltering streets of a Hispanic neighborhood—now, in the evening, coming alive with people and the din of radios and the smell of garlic and hot chilies. “I didn’t think there could be so many people who don’t speak English,” Mark said. No one on the streets paid any attention to us or to Lester’s leaflets, yet Mark and Lester did not seem to be discouraged. They looked as fresh and clean and energetic as they had when they started out at midday. ♦

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